Wonderful Find!

I was digging around in some of my art stuff. You know, organizing, reorganizing and making determinations as to whether I really need to keep "that particular scrap of paper" or not. I save everything. Seriously, there are times when I really must get a little more particular about what I am saving. There is only so much "but I might USE it for something cool" I can keep around. Might (use) is kind of the operative word here. My stash of saved stuff is huge and might be getting out of hand. I'm still working on that.

Anyway, I did run into a wonderful find! I taught the elementary after school art classes for a couple of years a few years back and typically, inevitably, I would have more to bring home to my stash. Some of it would be my own demonstrations for the class, some of it would be parents not really wanting to keep what their children created. Which is rather awful isn't it? I kept all of my children's art. Maybe that makes me weird, but I say it's important. I can go into more of that later at some point. Some of it was children themselves who didn't want to keep what they created. Which I also find sad. Even more of it was just forgetfulness on their part and I couldn't track them down to give it back, or whatever. The point is I have quite a bit of it and I don't ever want it to go to waste because some young mind took a turn at trying and I'd like to think it helped in some small way to guide them forward in life.

So I saved them. One of the classes we did was to put some color down in interesting ways, try not to make it muddy, keep the color separate and use just three of them to start. We will be jazzing it up later, after we find the neat shapes that might be popping out. In this case we went for a "sea" theme. Fish, shells, beachy stuff. Once our paint dried (tempera dries remarkably fast) let's whip out our oil pastels and sea what sort of "fishing" we can do. (I know, I'm clever that way) You get the drift. It was a fun class and probably one of the better ones. The kids had a blast and all sorts of interesting critters "made themselves known" in the process. 

I thought I would share a few pieces of that class. One is my demonstration, one is a serious helper piece I did for a little girl and her mom (at which they did another one and kept that one, leaving me with the one I essentially did for them) and one a little girl I could not track down left behind. 

It makes me think I would really like to get back into it. It was fun and I know the kids loved it. So did most of the parents, once they themselves actually relaxed. I wonder how many elementary school art teachers flat out ruined it for so many to be able to just sit and play. It's not like it's a masters level class! Sheesh.

So, here are the pieces. I hope you enjoy looking at them and perhaps start thinking about how you might share this with your own kids or start up a class for your school, or homeschooling group.

Here is the demo piece I did to start the class off.

Here is a piece that I helped a family to make some design decisions - since I ended up doing the majority of it they then understood and made a new and spectacular one without my help :-)

This is the lovely piece that one of the kids created. Notice her imagination started going into wonderful places, like the dinosaurs! Great piece! First grade :-)