Drawing and Painting Pumpkins

Here's a fun fall project where you can introduce numerous concepts like; lines, shading, and warm/cool colors. First, I teach students how I draw a pumpkin. I always teach that before you paint to practice your drawing and plan your painting. And I love talking about painting fruits, and stress that there's not such thing as a "perfect" pumpkin. They can be fat, tall, bumpy, lop-sided, etc. Students painted on a 12 x 12 stretched canvas with acrylic paints.

We added a little green puff paint for the vines and tricked out our edges with stripes. Students were kindergarten through 2nd grade (one fourth grader), and completed their paintings in a 2-hour workshop.

Painting Pears

This is one of my favorite painting lessons that I do with kids. I usually do it in my summer workshops. I wish I had more pictures of the process, but I don't. It's a great lesson to introduce shadows and highlights and mixing colors. We paint on a 16 x 20 canvas with acrylic. I instruct students to paint BIG. I also demonstrate how to draw a pear (start out with a bigger circle on bottom and a smaller circle on top, then connect the curves). This painting usually takes 2-3 hours. The results are always adorable and work of art that parents love to hang in their home.

Pet Portraits

It's been awhile since my last post....been busy trying to wrap up my art class semester, celebrating birthday parties, our 15-year anniversary, mother's day teas, field trips and helping with school projects. Whew! I don't know about you, but this time of the year is so busy for me.

I just had to do a post to show off the end of the year project for my advanced classes. These kids are 2nd-4th grade, and most have taken art from me for two or more years. I was so impressed by their finished works. I did allow them to use a cheap projector I have- just to get the basic outline of their pet shape and to block in values. I wanted the lesson to focus more on values and painting instead of drawing. These took three 1-hour classes to complete. They are done in acrylics on a 16 x 20 stretched canvas. I'm taking this summer off so maybe I'll have time to catch up posting the rest of this year's projects. Happy Mother's Day!

Sunflowers in Acrylic

It's so cold here, I had to think warm and sunny thoughts for awhile. Here's a great summer workshop painting project that introduces Van Gogh, still life and value. I let the students design their own vases for their sunflowers. I always have a vase of sunflowers for the students to view. We discuss lighting and shading. I premix the paints and have everyone work from the same color palate so I can demo the shading as we go along. These are always a favorite and the parents can't wait to frame them.