We have moved on from watercolours in  our Art class.  We tried a couple more techniques with watercolours first, including masking areas with masking fluid and combining watercolour with black pen outline.  Maybe I will post about them some time, but as I have yet to post about the giant snowman my kids made with their cousin in January,  I wouldn’t hold your breath!

When we first began watercolour everyone complained that it was hard and they couldn’t do it, but as the weeks went by they improved and mastered several different techniques.  The week I brought out the pastels, I was told again that it was too hard.  It is hard, I agree and has to be approached quite differently to watercolour.

We have several sets of pastels, each one a little different and by the end of the lesson they are spread from one end of the table to the other.  During the first lesson we tried several techniques with pastel just to see what they could do.  Blending was the most popular and  continues to be used quite a lot.  It is hard to get used to the idea that the colour  needs to be built up layer over layer.   Although we roughly shade in the main colour areas first it takes a while to give definition to the elements in the picture.

The following pastel drawings are from our second class; the first week we drew fruit, something I did many times  in highschool and college art classes.  It wasn’t very popular with my group so we moved onto landscapes the next week.

The one above with the dramatic sky is B9’s.

We did a few more snowscapes and then tried a seascape before the class as it was adjourned.  The writers went back to writing and the younger two resumed their ancient history studies.  But I was having too much fun to stop so we found a new time slot and made it a non-mandatory subject.  For this Daisy project I had four students.

We started with a sketch of a pineapple concentrating on the negative space, ie. we had to draw the pineapple by shading in the background not by sketching a pineapple.  This helped us look at the space the pineapple took up rather than the pineapple itself.  After that we did the same thing with a daisy, using an image on the computer as our model.  Instead of shading in the background with a pencil we painted in the background with yellow and green washes, leaving our daisy shape white.

The following week we practiced before filling our daisies in with grey shadows where necessary to define their petals and then orange and yellow wash to make their centres.

The top one is by A13, she thinks it looks like someone painted a daisy on their camouflage pants.  I don’t have all four to show you because one student was adamant that hers not be displayed this time.  I really liked it, but there was no budging her!  The ones I did in preparation have been added to my painting page.

During January and February the Group of 3 had  art class once a week which I taught.  This has been good and bad.  Good, because lesson prep for an art class is fun!  Bad, because there is so much I don’t know.

We were fitting the art class in while the writing classes were not meeting so I wanted to plan some exercises for developing technique as well as some where we would complete a piece of art.  We began with some drawing exercises which, apparently did not appeal to everyone.  We looked at perspective and proportion and how to get it right.  I set up boxes and bottles and a cardboard cylinder for us to draw — not that exciting I admit.  We also drew a vase with dried hydrangeas in it; again not a popular choice.  I, the art teacher was happy  nevertheless, with the results of the exercises.  The following week we drew some of the same items breaking them down into basic shapes first, and we did the vase of hydrangeas again – and again it was not popular.  (In future weeks I carried it over and sat it on the table for fun just to see what the response would be)

Our first piece of art was a watercolour snow-scape with silhouetted trees.  The first step was to create the background which was a combination of snow and sky.  We wet the whole paper and used different blues with a little black to make a swirly, abstract sky, leaving some areas white to suggest snow.   While that was drying we practiced drawing winter trees, either bare deciduous or different kinds of conifers.   The next week we added silhouettes of trees to our snowscapes.

Here are some of the paintings by the students including L15’s above.

There are a couple more snowscapes I will feature later when the finishing touches have been added.

(I’ve created a new page for my own paintings which I will update from time to time.  You can find the link in small print in the blog header)