Art Institute

I just finished my 5 day "Art Institute" for teachers. I justified taking the class to my district (who paid for it) by saying that it was a great way to teach language to kids through visual means. But really, the reason I wanted to take the class was to help develop Cal's artistic talents. I hope I can help Cal with (what seems to be) some of his natural gifts. But many projects we did were too advanced for a preschool aged child.

Here is a sampler of our projects based on the scrapbooking I did.

After the first day of class, I came home and excitedly shared my "Struggling Artist Masterpiece" with the family. The idea is to fill a big paper with beautiful designs that "cannot be named". But you are only given 3 colors: yellow, magenta, cyan. Our problem at home was that our yellow had deteriorated since buying it last December, so we only used 2 of the primary colors.


After the second day's class, I rushed to the store to buy some new yellow paint. I had the kids make "Handprint color wheels". Then they used their rainbow colored hands to create their own masterpieces.




This project was called "Writing in the Sand with Sticks: Inspired by the Estuary". We used sticks with cloths wrapped around the ends and dipped them into thinned black paint. We designed sand, rocks, and water lines through the middle. Then the group chose a few oil pastel colors to stream throughout the entire middle section (the water). The rocks and sand were filled in with pastels with no consistency for pattern or colors.


I taught Cal how to make orange from magenta and yellow. We covered several sheets of paper with gorgeous colors. Hopefully, we'll use this colored paper later for some other project.

"Observational Drawing". My sketch (top center) was a cross section of an onion, maximized. Other people's drawings are also included on this collage.


The "Mask Project" was incredible. Although I wasn't thrilled with my end result compared to others (mine is at the top), it was an amazing process starting with painting all of the papers beautiful colors, and then eventually cutting those papers up to make these crazy 3-D masks.