Matisse Fish Bowls - Painting with Scissors

I just love how Matisse called his collage technique "painting with scissors".  It makes collage work seem so exciting.  In typical Matisse style these artworks ended up bright, colourful and fun!  There are quite a few lessons for this on the internet, I drew inspiration from a few yet especially the Artolazzi one.

 What you need:

• White paper
• Scissors
• Glue
• Accessories
• Painted or marbled paper (we used our marbled paper left over from mothers day presents for most of the fish bowls)
• Metallic paper (optional - I just put some out as I had some)
• Paints (we just used tempera blocks)
• Paint brushes

How to:

• Show the children how to draw a 3D room
• Paint making sure they use bring colours and put in some interesting wallpaper (in Mattise style)
• Whilst background is drying they can cut out the fishbowl, fish, leaves for background and table
• Glue onto background

The Results:

Cheers
Fiona

Birch Trees

I've seen lots of different versions of this lesson on Pinterest over the years.  I even tried it out myself about two years ago yet it seems to have taken ages to make it into one of my lessons. 

I planned to do this as an autumn lesson, yet the 3 weeks of clay went on and on and before I knew it winter was upon us.  Some children were happy to keep with the autumn theme, yet some insisted that it is now winter and used cool colours instead.  It's nice to have strong minded children in the class I guess (one of them was my own of course!).

Still love how these turned out.  A nice easy yet effective lesson. 

What you need:

• Paint (cool or warm colours)
• Sponges
• White paper x 2
• Credit cards
• Watered down black paint or black ink
• Scissors and glue

How to:
Backgrounds

• Sponge the paints all over the white piece of paper
• Leave to dry

Birch Trees

• Use a credit card dipped in ink to make trees by scraping it across the paper in lines
• Do this in portrait orientation so that the trees are long
• Leave to dry

Putting it all together

• Cut out birch trees.  Glue to background (in landscape mode).  Cut off extra tree hanging off the edges.  Hopefully this avoids floating trees when the bottom doesn't line up.

 The Results:
 

Cheers
Fiona

The Winter Holiday Challenge is Here!

We are about to embark on 2 weeks of Winter School holidays - BRRR!  Yet it is also the perfect time to rug up indoors and do lots of CREATING!!!   There is nothing better than playing with wool on those cold winter days, so that's the theme of the winter holiday challenge these holidays.

This is usually only open to my current students yet I will accept entries from children that attend the holiday workshops as well (they can just use a piece of wool they have at home).  Great prizes to be won (announced early Term 3).  Entries due by the first week of Term 3.

 



SUNNYSIDE ART HOUSE – WINTER HOLIDAY CHALLENGE

Keep creating these school holidays by entering the Sunnyside Art House Winter Holiday Challenge……

All you need to do is create a piece of artwork using some wool.

You may add more wool or use other art materials (such as paint, pastels, pencils, clay etc).

Some ideas are:

• Do a drawing and glue your wool to the picture
• Use your wool to do some finger knitting or knitting
• Use your wool to do some sewing
• Dip your wool into some paint and do a wool painting
• Wrap your wool around a stick or other object
• Use your wool to hang a piece of artwork you have made
• Use your wool to make a dream catcher
• Use your wool to make a pom pom

Let your imagination go wild and think up other ideas.  

A novelty eraser to everyone who enters and there will be prizes for the best entries.

Have a great creative, relaxing holidays!

Cheers

Fiona

Three weeks of Clay.....

We have just finished up a mammoth 3 weeks of clay both in my classes and at Art Club at school.  I seem to have clay absolutely EVERYWHERE!  The studio is as dirty as its ever been....yet its been so so so FUN!

I just love working with clay so its also given me an opportunity to play around a bit more myself, especially on the wheel. 

The artwork produced by the children has just been amazing.  Fingers crossed it all survives the trip out to Clayworks in Dandenong (where I get it fired since I don't have a kiln) and none of them blow up in the kiln.

I usually get all the children to work on the same project yet this time I let them choose what they wanted to make.  I've given suggestions and samples of what has worked in the past and even put some of my own creations out as inspiration.  What we have ended up with is a lovely variety of clay works ranging from cups, bowls, plates, pinch pots and sculpture.

That said it made it a busy class for me helping 10 students with individual projects and helping someone on the wheel at the same time.  With 40 students coming through my classes in a week and an extra 20 with art club that is a lot of clay work over 3 weeks! Lucky there is a long weekend coming up so I can have a mini break and let the back rest up from all that leaning over.

Above are a few sneak previews of the creations.  There are a few more weeks of drying to go, then the trip to the kiln, then the trip back, then we will glaze them, then they go back to the kiln, another trip back to my studio and finally home.  Pottery is a very long slow process!  Parents / students don't expect them back until at least half way through Term 3! That said I can't wait to post about the final products.

I am sending some projects home now though.  Some children produced way more items than I could fire or some of the works were too cracked or likely to contain air bubbles to fire.  I also had quite a few wonky pots from the pottery wheel.  The children painted these items with just regular tempera paint.  Most of the pottery was produced using paper clay (I like using this as it gives me the choice of firing the items or not) so they should hold up fairly well when dry (yet are still more fragile than normal air dry clay or fired pottery).

I hope your children loved working with clay as much as I did!

Cheers
Fiona

Elephants

For these elephants we used the wonderful ideas and lesson plans from:
Ink Elephant art lesson -  Deep Space Sparkle
Festive Elephants from India - Painted Paper
Indian Elephants - Mary Making

Thank you!

The children really enjoyed drawing these elephants and I love the final results. 

Cheers
Fiona

Mother's Day presents 2015

Hand painted scarves for Mothers Day

This post is actually over a week late - I usually like to post about Mother's Day on Mother's Day yet we had screen free week last week and its taken me all week to catch up!  Silly how addicted we all are to our screens (well me anyway..)

Anyway I hope all the Mum's out there had a wonderful Mother's Day.  I certainly loved my raspberry crepes and cup of tea in bed, followed by lunch at a local cafe and then my parents and sister around for dinner.  I even had time to lie on the couch and read my book for a while.... It was the first Mother's Day in 9 years I didn't run or walk the Mother's Day Classic and with all the rain I have to say I picked a good one to miss.  Well done if you did it!

I love to spoil the Mum's as much as I can for Mother's Day (Mum's deserve it!) so this year we made the following (over a few weeks of classes):

• Hand painted Scarves
• Marbled Notebooks
• Portrait CD's 
• Living Cards

The idea for the hand painted scarves came from That Artist Woman - thank you!  They turned out beautifully.  It was a lot of work though for someone like me who is actually not that much of a sewer or sewist (love this word - didn't know it existed until I looked up if I could use the word sewer (one who sews as opposed to sewer (drain) - A sewist is a new word that combines sewing and artist and is used for someone who creates sewn pieces of art...........anyway I digress).  I had issues cutting the chiffon straight to begin with and hemming 40 scarves took a lot of time (about 20 hours to cut, pin, hem and wash!!).  I loved using watered down acrylic paints rather than fabric paints though as it made the whole thing much more affordable.  I'm looking forward to trying this technique again with glue batik later in the year...

We made the marbled notebooks as I had children begging to do Shaving Cream Marbling (you can read about this here from a previous post).  As always it was lots of fun and the notebooks justified the whole experience.

The portrait CD's idea came from K-6 Art - thank you!  I have mine opened out and sitting on the windowsill and I do love them.

The living cards idea came from Art Projects for Kids - thank you!  This was ideal as I was only half way through my box of 100 CD cases from the portraits project the week before.  I had also lashed out and bought a whole set of Posca Paint Pens which I had been eyeing up for some time (they have so many uses, especially in street art, check out this facebook page).  The two living cards from my children are growing wonderfully on the windowsill and I have to say its a great novel idea for a card with a difference!

A belated Mother's Day to all the mothers.

Cheers
Fiona

Screen Free Week - May 4th to May 10th

Its Screen Free week this week - we are participating are you?  My children are objecting of course yet I've given them a few weeks to get used to the idea and they have now accepted their fate.

You can read all about screen free week here.

There is a great post on screen free week activities by Zina Harrington on The Artful Parent.  This is what inspired me......

What a wonderful opportunity to get CREATIVE!  Poppy, Leo and I were very creative this weekend when we produced the artwork below for the Kingston Art Blitz - theme this year Fusion...Lot's of fun by the way - you all need to do it with us next year!

Of course if you are reading this post you haven't yet started your screen free week (we will forgive you if you start a little late).  I'm posting this Sunday evening yet it seems to take overnight to show up on the blog.

Of course this will be a challenge for me too - yet I'm quite looking forward to the whole thing.  Maybe I will have some early nights without the distraction of Pinterest!

Good luck to you if you try it!

Cheers
Fiona

PS. My Mothers Day post will be delayed to after Mothers Day due to screen free week (this gives you a chance to open your presents and enjoy some screen free time with your children...).

Happy Mothers Day to all the mothers out there - enjoy your day.