The Kiln and The Bench

Three weeks ago I had a big disaster in the art room with my kiln.  It also caused half the building to lose power just as a group of kids were eating lunch in the cafeteria...oops.  Turns out it isn't easy finding someone to come to fix a kiln either.  Of course a set of the most important things were in the kiln at the time too...the tiles I was making for a memorial bench for our student who passed away last year.  I tried taking them to another kiln in the district but because I couldn't be there to keep an eye on it, things didn't work out. 

So right before the break I was able to get a very nice technician to come from the south to fix it.  As I suspected it was not the kiln itself, but our electrical work in the building that caused the plug and cord to start to burn up.  So the kiln is ready to go...but now I am waiting for someone else to fix the electric on the wall so I can plug it back in.

In the meantime the giant bluestone bench slab made it home with me right before the break and tile work is progressing on it well.  But now is the hardest part of all..the background. Lots of cutting around all the letters that's for sure.  I feel like I have to work on it at least everyday.  Spike looks the best...here's a video of him being put together.  Unfortunately the video is only 4 seconds long, as compared to the hour it really took to make him.  More to come on the bench..

The Boy with the Pink Hair Portraits

I found this lesson on another art teachers blog...http://grichart.blogspot.com/, but she only had teacher examples posted.  Still thought the illustrations from the book looked adorable so I found it in Barnes and Noble.  it's based on a book called The Boy With the Pink Hair by Perez Hilton.

I attempted the portraits with 3rd grade and they came out great.  We called them "Cartoon Style".  I did a step by step of a basic face shape and gave them two choices for styles of the eyes. Some kids were hesitant about changing their hair color and others dove right into something wacky.  The background is a watercolor wash over construction paper crayon circles.  It was a little tough to keep them from applying the black deadly watercolor too heavy.  I constantly circled the room to make sure they were adding tons of water to it.  Overall they really enjoyed the story too!

Ugly Bunny Time

Ok since it's a week before Easter I thought I'd start the first blog post off with my Ugly Bunnies that we made in honor of my second grade student who passed away last year.  Stephen loved Ugly Dolls and they brought him a lot of happiness towards the end when he was really sick.   I like to think he was inspired by the How to Draw Ugly Dolls book I had in the art room that I often found him and a friend using during free time.

The Ugly Bunnies have been appearing a lot lately on Pinterest, pinned on a number of other art teachers boards.  Unfortunately it only links back to my old flickr account. No one seems to use flickr anymore these days...we've all moved over to Pinterest for collecting ideas. I'm glad his memory can live on through other kids still doing the project.

We actually did the bunnies with a lesson on tinting tempera paints.  We did look at the typical faces, style and shapes of Ugly Dolls too.  At the end we cleaned up the black lines with oil pastel and added the spring time objects in the background with construction paper crayons.  I'm not sure I was crazy about the Easter grass at the bottom..it probably would have been fine without it. 

Happy Spring and welcome to the new blog.  Our friends at the AENJ conferences have been asking for a few years for us to start a blog based on the presentations we've done, so I am finally getting around to that!

More to come this week...