Young at Art

Media: Bristol paper, Sharpie, & watercolor.

As our community landscapes become more industrialized, filled with geometric man-made shapes, and students' days are carefully planned to a T, this project highlights organic shapes for fun, spontaneous mark-making, with an emphasis on the process but whose outcome is a glorious freeform that couldn’t have been planned. Students will discover the calming and uplifting benefits of doodling as they draw and doodle organic shapes, embracing mistakes, using Sharpies to fill in their freeforms with organic textures and patterns where lines explode into weaving waves of wiggles, dots and bubbly poofs!

Small

World Castles

Media: Mixed media paper, Sharpie, Watercolor 

This project will introduce students to the concept of “Style Guide” in design and learn to apply this important design principle to present a consistent style or brand. “Small World Castles” is a watercolor project to create a fantasy castle by following the style of its creator Mary Blair. Each student’s design will be consistent but unique in their own way.

Tiny Folk Landscapes

Media: Black drawing paper, drawing pencil, & oil pastels. 

This project is intended to educate students on the components of a successful landscape while also exploring the value of presentation itself. During the creation of the piece we'll discuss the intention of a landscape. That is to create "a place", and we want that place to be interesting so the viewers can imagine themselves standing in that place. We'll cover the 3 components of every landscape; background, foreground and middle ground, as well as some elements of "perspective" that we're NOT using that make this a "Folk" Landscape. To take everything a step further, we'll go into creating an experience for the viewer through presentation.

Aboriginal Animal Art

Media: Black canvas paper & Acrylic paint

Aboriginal art is part of the oldest continuous culture in world history. This art is based on story-telling to convey information and knowledge on matters of survival and land management. Aboriginal artists inherit rights to paint certain cultural stories. Ownership of stories is transmitted down generational lines, therefore stories are often managed within family groups. 

Students will learn about one of the prehistoric forms of art, select a 'spirit animal' and use aboriginal symbols to paint  their own Aboriginal Animal Art. 

Alebrijes:

Art of

oaxaca, Mexico

Media: Clay (PlayDoh), glue, Acrylic paint

​

With the recent release of the Disney Pixar movie Coco (2017) the fantastical and brightly colored animals shown in the afterlife of the movie called Alebrijes have joined our popular culture. They have a fascinating origin story.

These crazy hybrid creatures were created by Pedro Linares Lopez (1906-1992) who was a skilled ‘cartonero’ or paper maché artist living in Mexico City. He was a contemporary of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and many other popular artists from the Academia de San Carlos.

​This project has been designed to teach the students about this colorful and fun art style from Mexican culture and let the students create their own fantastic Alebrije out of colored clay, wood sticks and acrylic paint. The goal is to allow each student to design their own animal after being shown a number of techniques and suggestions for creating the pieces and painting them.

Ojo de Dios

Media: Sticks, yarn

​

Invented by the Huichol, an indigenous people of western Mexico, as a symbol for health, fortune, and a good life.
Typically made with wood sticks and brightly colored yarn, Ojo de Dios are characterized by four points of the "eye" believed to represent fire, earth, air, and water, while the center of it was said to be a

portal between the spirit world and the mortal world.