Shaving Cream Peacocks

My school has started an after school enrichment/tutoring program called LEAPS, which stands for Lottery for Education: Afterschool Programs. This program gives the school opportunities to have after school enrichment activities that enhance and reinforce the schools curriculum. Both myself and the other art teacher at my school, Mr. Stephens, have been allowed to have an art club. Between the two of us, there are 2 art clubs offered each day, Monday through Thursday. I have the Monday/Wednesday classes, and he has the Tuesday/Thursday classes. The classes are small for now, and we each have another teacher in the room with us. I have been having a blast with the classes. With only 5-7 kids at a time, you can do so much more and get even messier. The first project that we did is the shaving cream peacocks that are pictured below. I sprayed shaving cream on the tables and let the kids play in it for a few. Then I showed the students how to splatter and drip liquid watercolors onto the paint, and then use the back end of a brush to drag through the shaving cream to marbleize the paint. Then we pressed watercolor paper into the shaving cream, lifted it off and scraped off the shaving cream. We did this twice, making sure to have some areas that were more blue for the body in the second print. The next week, we cut the paper up into peacock shapes, and added construction paper in for added contrast. Everything was outlined with sharpies, and of course we had to glue on wiggle eyes. They really liked making the eyes two different sizes and colors!

I have a lot more projects planned such as origami, toilet paper tube creations, three dimensional stars and more. Right now they are finishing up a bug made from bread and glue. I will post pictures when they are finished.

Teacher Art Club

My school is very large, and I have been asked many times by some of our teachers to have a fun art activity for the teachers to do once in a while. I finally decided to create the "Lakeview Design Center Teacher Art Club", in order to fulfill this want/need. I had 14 teachers come to this month's meeting. We created acrylic landscape paintings on canvas board. It was very interesting and amusing to listen to the teachers, most of which insisted that they were not artistic at all, as they sounded a lot like my students. I did not put an example on the board right away, because as we art teachers know, I would have had 14 copies of the example. Instead, I talked them through the drawing of the landscape (a simple farm scene) and then when they were done drawing, I told them to start painting, and then left the room for a few minutes (really, I had to go, I swear!) A few of them panicked, some started painting, but most of them just stared at the paint. The finally all started to paint, but there were so many questions. Some of them also wanted to see the example, and got frustrated with me when I wouldn't show it until an hour or so into the "class". But because of this, there were many different paintings and color schemes. I will post pictures of the finished paintings when they are done, this project is taking more than one sitting. Wonder what I should do to them next month?