Art Class - Thanksgiving Still Life

I decided to do a Thanksgiving still-life - in sepia, if they were up for it. So I had to go out and buy a bunch of vegetables that I don't normally eat (translate: know how to cook). Thankfully my wife could make something out of it all after the class - the big vegetable on the bottom left ended up in turkey soup.

Oddly enough, the younger class had better luck with this than the older class. They just took what they saw and ran with it. The older class was trying to draw it as accurately as possible, so very few of them finished the drawing. I don't really fault them for that - it's not like they didn't finish because they weren't trying, it's more that that were trying too hard - but I do want to see if they can loosen up in future classes.

From the younger class:

I actually liked that this was off center. There's a nice compositional balance to it all compacted in the bottom corner.

And this one I loved. She just took the basic idea of what was there and ran with it. The basket handle is huge, and it works really well. And why not add a rainbow, I ask you. It's practically a Thanksgiving wonderland she's drawn here. Great way to pump up a still life!

Art Class - Color Mixing

It looks like this should be called "Art Class - Leaves," but the leaves were just the excuse to follow up on my color mixing class. I limited the colors they could use to yellow, magenta, cyan, and white. They did really well on it - in fact, I taught this before the pumpkin painting class, which is probably how they were able to get a whole painting done in an hour! This class took two sessions to complete (these posts are slightly out of order, but I wanted to put up my Jack O'Lantern pic before it got too far from Hallowe'en).

Since it was color theory, I had initially planned to have them paint the same leaf in complementary colors, like I did as well. But after two classes on just one leaf, they were ready to move on, and the pumpkin paintings were a lot more fun. But I like my purple leaf for it's own sake, so I'm glad I painted it as well.

Art Class - Halloween

The kids in the class wanted to do something for Halloween, and they wanted something substantial for a decoration. So I thought, why not paint on tiles? They're considerably substantial, as I remember from carrying boxes of them around when we were working on the kitchen floor. But the class is only an hour, so I figured I had to be able to paint one in that time if I was going to ask them to do so. So this is my one-hour painting of a Jack O'Lantern.

You'll notice that the pumpkin in the photo actually isn't carved. I did that on purpose - the kids are really in to being creative, so I wanted a blank pumpkin (as it were) so they could make their own face on their painting. Some did it in reverse - made the background lit in orange, with a black pumpkin in shadow with glowing features, and one just painted the pumpkin as itself, which came out really nice.

And on a related note - I found an explanation of why Halloween pumpkins are called Jack O'Lanterns. It comes from the story of Stingy Jack, told here on the History Channel web site!