One of the three things I brought into the class for my students to sketch was a birdfeeder. You can see below how amazing these two sketches are for their third class. Yes, both Nikita (left drawing) and Aaliyah are realizing something about the challenge of perspective, but they are working at it. The side panels of the feeder is glass and so it was another challenge to communicate that in the drawing.

All of this will come, meanwhile I am excited to see the amazing skills already evident in their work. And it's only the third class!

The goal was to not only get a feel for laying down the colors but to begin to play with blending. I encouraged the students to pick 4 or 5 colors. Then to make some swirls and curvy lines on their sketchbook page, making this zen kind of design. 

Oil pastels are so fun not only for the students but for all ages, because they are bright, they are intense in color and they can be mixed and blended in surprising ways. You can place the colors over one another. You can push down harder for solid and lesser for a less intense colour. When you go over other colors this results in interesting affects. You can use your fingers to blend the one into another. Fading from one to the other and so on. It won't dry so you can go make a meal and come back to it later. If fact apparently, it never dries even in 100 years, I'm told. Wow. 

Don't you just want to jump in and join my class? I know...it was fun. And we are going to have more fun with this medium.

Then in addition, you can scratch the surface with a tooth pick or a wooden skewer kind of object. This way you can bring out a color you went over with another. You can see Bailey used a toothpick to scratch a flower over her expressionistic color design. You can see how the turquoise under the red is revealed. Beautiful.

So now the world opens up to lots of ways one can work with oil pastels. We have a plan. We are going to make more art in the classes ahead with oil pastel.

My teaching year has begun, this week being the second class of the new year. Like last year, I have two classes every Wednesday morning. The First is made up of the grade 9 and 10's while the second is grade 6 - 8's. They total 41 amazing students.
 
I am seeking to establish a routine, every class beginning with an artistic warm-up session of "contour drawing". Students can come in, get their pencil and paper, find a seat and simply begin drawing! No waiting for instructions necessary, they will know what to do and they also know why we do this.

This week we did "Selfies" where we drew objects or symbols of some of our favorite activities. In the art world they are called "Self Portraits".  As the year progresses we will do more of these in different ways. Great markers as to who we are and how we change.

I would like you to meet a gifted teenager, Kate
Powell. Kate "has shared her Art projects on social
media platforms since she was fifteen years old. She currently has over 12,000 fans on Facebook and 34,000 followers on tumblr, with one of her tumblr posts gaining over 112,000 notes. We talk to Kate about how she has built this following and how she launched her career before graduating from high school. -
See more at


ttp://www.studentartguide.com/featured/kate-powell-art#sthash.52kTdA5X.dpufEvery

This bottom picture is her "selfie" and I would encourage you to look up this website and her blog, you just have to read her story. I would like to talk about this in our art class soon.

Thanks for visiting this new blog site.

Talk about "Selfies" look at this quote, what dose that tell you?