This month's teacher art club... bookmaking

This month for the art club that I sponsor for the teachers here at Lakeveiw, we focused on bookmaking. We made two books, the first an accordion fold book with hard cover, and a flag book. I started the teachers off by having them use shaving cream and liquid watercolor to marbleize paper for the covers of the flag book. Just so you know... this was hysterical...shaving cream was everywhere... and threats of shaving cream facials were volleyed about... but they did a great job. While the papers were drying, we worked on the accordion book, and then the flag book. The teachers had a lot of fun, we even had some student teachers join in. Everyone was discussing how the books could be used in their classrooms. It was so satisfying to listen in on the collaboration that was happening in the room!

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?