Drawing American Sign Language Hands

My private art lessons are very organic-what we study ebbs and flows with what I think the student would be interested in or in an area they may need to develop further. One day, my student and her mom were discussing a piece my student had done (at home) and there was some, ahem, disagreement as to how readable the hand was in the drawing. After a little more discussion, my student admitted that, although she felt she drew hands perfectly fine, they were "hard" and she "hated drawing them." Hmmmm...well, never one to shy away from a challenge, I tried to think of a way we could practice drawing hands in a way that seemed fun. 

This spells "ART."

So, here's what we did:

The first week, we spent practicing drawing hands in different positions. I found this great tutorial online at Neon Dragon Art that I thought would work well to illustrate the anatomy of the hand as well as seeing a hand as a 3D form from the beginning. We worked our way through the different variations Jessica "Neon Dragon" Peffer presented, using our own hands as "models." It is quite difficult to draw something as complex as the human hand--especially when you don't want to! But we kept trying and trying. We had a couple shaky starts and we needed to keep remembering to look at our 3D models--our own hand, and draw what we saw, not what we thought was there.

Once my student was confident drawing hands in a variety of positions, I brought out the American Sign Language chart that shows the letters of the alphabet using photos of hands. We practiced the letters and she chose a word she wanted illustrate. At first she chose "CREATE" but the thought of drawing 5 more hands (one for each letter of the word) proved too much so she settled on "ART" instead.

She did a great job drawing the hands in pencil and then outlining them in Sharpie. For the background, she chose to do a Jackson Pollock-inspired drippy painting using watercolors and temperas that she drizzles and splattered all over. The colors were custom-mixed--she had a plan--they are her favorite colors.

Once everything was done, she brought the pieces together (making sure the hands were in the correct order). She was very happy with her piece (as am I!) and *hopefully* she'd say it isn't too bad drawing hands after all.

All About Me: More Faith Ringgold Story Quilts

The other day I started a new series of classes called "All About Me" which is, sigh, not actually about ME, but has children creating artwork inspired by THEM: their portraits, their names, their interests.

With the first project I wanted to do something that would get their imaginations going, so we created quilt squares inspired by Faith Ringgold's "Tar Beach." I had originally posted this lesson here.

This project is great because the main character of the story is the same age as my students (about 3rd grade). In this lesson, the children are asked "where would you fly if you could go anywhere, real or imagined?" This project is a wonderful way to get to know my students--they come up with the best places to fly to! This project originally took two one-hour class sessions with my homeschool kiddos, but I only wanted to devote one class to this project with my after school kiddos. So, I downsized the project a bit. Here's how:

• For the background, we used 8" x 10" rectangles of mat board 
• For their drawn image, we used a 6" square of white paper
• For the area they wrote on, we used a 2" x 6" rectangle
• The patterned paper pieces, we used 1" squares (as in the other post)

How'd it go?

I was very happy with the process! The prep was easy and the project very portable (that's important since I am an "art-on-a-cart" teacher. We had time to read the entire book, discuss it a bit and then take our time drawing where we would go if we could fly. After the initial discussion, the children just worked along. This was a bit of a larger group than the last time I presented this project (we had 13 Daisy Girl Scouts visiting the classroom), but it was a smooth-running lesson. Some of the children finished about 10 minutes early (we meet for an hour and fifteen minutes). Early finishers could look at quilt-related books or work on quilt coloring pages.

When they were done, I put all of the quilt squares together and magically our finished quilt appeared. Enjoy! 

If I could fly I would go to...
the moon, Atlantis, Hawaii, out for ice cream,
to the beach, to Chihuahua Land, to a horse farm...

Inspired By Spring and Alma Woodsey Thomas

I posted a project idea about African American artist Alma Woodsey Thomas awhile back, check out the post here. Thomas was a art teacher for almost 4 decades, became a prolific Abstract Expressionist painter during her retirement, and had her first show at 80 years old! WOW! How inspiring!

Here's the group project: "Sunset Over the Ocean."

For my last Modern Art class with my homeschool kiddos, I thought we'd do a relaxed collage project based on Thomas' work. The children had fun and created some very beautiful pieces. It was also a great opportunity to use up all of those paper scraps I've been collecting all year!

When they were done their personal pieces, they could work together to create a group piece that will be on display at the Grande Finale next month. I love how the group project came out--so different than the one the group in the original post created (and I loved that one too!). Amazing!

Enjoy this one-day, earth-friendly project!

"Colours"

"Falling Fire"

"Falling Leaves"

"Flowering Meadow"

This one had a title,
but he wrote it after I took the picture!
I think the bits are falling stars...

"Color Wave"

Walk Like An Egyptian Costumes

I just finished up week 4 of Egyptian Art with my after school kiddos. We created some great projects during our time together, and this was the final project: 3D funerary masks that you can wear as a costume.

The idea for making these came from the book, "The Ancient Egypt Pack: A Three-Dimensional Celebration of Egyptian Mythology, Culture, Art, Life and the Afterlife," by Christos Kondeatis & Sara Maitland. I picked this little gem up at a used bookstore for a couple of bucks and it was just perfect for my Egyptian Art class because it has all sorts of little pop ups and fold-outs that echoed the projects we were doing in class. One of the pieces that comes with the book is a 3D model of the famous gold Tutankhamun funeral mask that you can put together. My copy of the book did not come with the directions on how to put the mask's 25 pieces together, but I thought the children would love to create their own 3D models of the masks. Then, as I was doing research for my class, I saw a few sites that offered printable and wearable versions of King Tut's headdress, mask and the necklace/chest plate.

With a bit of downloading and printing, I was able to provide the children with printables they could color in their down time. I printed the pieces at home on white card stock and had the children use watercolors to add color to the pieces. For the gold, I had them use metallic gold acrylic. Colored pencils would also work, but would be super-tedious I think. During our last class, we assembled the pieces into wearables and they had fun posing in their unique creations.

This project could be done in many ways, if you have a bit more time or you wanted the children to have more creative input besides just coloring, you could make templates using the outlines of these pieces and have the children add their own details. The children had fun wearing the masks, as you can see below...I think it was a neat project to do and I will probably do it again (or some variation) next year.

Here are the sites you can find the printable elements of the Egyptian costumes. Thank you so much for the creators of these pieces! Give them some love and use their pieces in the way they intended (for free use with the kids in your life!). Enjoy!

Printable King Tut Headdress
First Palette has a great printable headdress. You can either print out version to color or one that it already colored and ready-to-go. They also have lots of other great Egyptian projects (along with lots of other great project ideas).

Printable Mask and Necklace
Alpha Mom has an adorable mask (complete with beard) along with a very elaborate-looking necklace. These projects are easy to print out and assemble. Very cool!