Cool on warm...

Into our second week of Art Explorers, we revisited paintings from the previous class and warm colored papers, then added cool colors with drawing and a new material: collage.

Using colored glue helps emphasize this lesson in color relationships. A single drop of a non-toxic liquid water-color or food coloring works well. The colored glue can be especially helpful when working on a white background as it is easier to see. 

Large paper strips are great as a simple first introduction into collage and can be manipulated easily into interesting, 3-dimensional shapes. You may find you get quite a few glue-paintings too - but it's all art!

More mixed media...

After working with the recycled crayons, brushes and paint, this artist decided to move onto mixing pencil into her painting, which at the time was only being used to write artists' names on their artwork. 

 And she literally mixed it with her painting!

This pencil became an experiment as a new type of paintbrush. This is another good example of going with the flow in an open studio setting and making sure young artists get a chance to play and discover with the materials without a lot of "Nos" from the adults. (Within reason!)

Working warm...

This first week in our Spring Session Art Explorers class, we've begun with drawing and mixing our warm colors. Students are given pastels and recycled crayons to start, and the lesson is extended with a small tray of red, yellow and white tempra colors with which our artists can mix and paint.

 
Here, this artist has realized he can use one of the recycled crayons as a stamp, dipping it into his paint. This became a great learning moment for creating tools and shapes with paint. Clean up is easy as the tempra washes easily off the wax and pastels at the end of class, so there no worries of ruining materials. Besides, creativity and self-expression are worth much more!