Week 10- Creating the Armature for our Animal Sculptures

This week, kids brought in supples like plastic pop bottles and cardboard and starting putting together the armature or framework for their paper mâché animal sculptures...



We secured the parts with lots and lots of masking tape...



Some kids used cardboard to make the underlying shape of their animal...





Next week, the kids that still need to fine tune their armatures can do so. If you forgot to bring something for your sculpture, please remember to bring it next week! Kids who are ready to start sculpting with wet newspaper will get the opportunity to begin that on Tuesday. See you then!

Week 9- Beginning our Animal Sculptures

This week, the kids chose an animal they'd like to sculpt out of paper mâché. To start, we drew our animal to get familiar with it's shape and body parts.





We also talked about gathering supplies for the armature of the animal by asking ourselves questions like these: What sort of shape is the body? Would a 2 liter bottle serve as a good base for it, or something else? Is it flat like a turtle? Perhaps a plastic lid would work. Some kids are collecting things like paper towel tubes for legs. Cardboard works well for ears and wings. Wire can be used for thin parts like antlers. And of course, everyone will need newspaper.



Here's an example of a 1st grader's animal project, an okapi, done with paper mâché. The body is a two liter bottle, the legs are paper towel tubes, the head is a small Gatorade bottle, and the ears are cardboard.



Hopefully this gives you an idea of what we are about to undertake. It should be lots of fun!

Week 8- Finishing our Watercolor Landscape Paintings

I'm a bit late in putting up this post... sorry about that. Last Tuesday we finished our watercolor landscapes by adding some detail. We used watercolor pencils and I showed the kids the different ways you can manipulate them. You can draw on wet paper with them, draw on dry paper and then blend them with a wet watercolor brush, or you can just draw on the dry paper if you want crisp lines. They really are very versatile and can give your painting lots of exciting detail.

I didn't bring my camera this past week. However, you'll all have the opportunity to view the students' work at the Pioneer Coffee Company soon. The owner has agreed to exhibit their paintings and I plan to bring them up there and hang them in week or so. I'll let you all know when the big unveiling is, so that you can check it out. I think you'll be impressed at what they've accomplished.

This week, we'll be starting our paper mâché animal sculptures. We'll be drawing from photographs to get more acquainted with the shape of our animals. And we'll also be gathering ideas for objects that will work well as a base or armature for our sculpture. The kids seem really excited to start this next project!

Week 7- Continuing our Watercolor Landscapes

Today we continued painting our watercolor landscape paintings. I talked about layering color while emphasizing taking your time.


I talked a bit about local color... which is "The actual color of an object or surface, unaffected by shadow coloring, light quality or other factors." In other words, the local color of a red apple, is red. But, that red may have shades of other colors in it if you look closer.... like green, yellow, orange or even blue or purple. The same goes for trees, grass and mountains. They may look green, but if you look closer you'll see yellow, orange, brown, etc.



Here's their progress so far:



Next week, we'll continue with these paintings. Mrs. Luker's got some watercolor pencils and we'll learn about ways to incorporate more detail into our paintings with them.

Looking ahead, Mrs. Luker and I have discussed some projects we'll be tackling in the near future including paper mâché animal sculptures and Aboriginal Dreaming paintings using a Contact Paper/acrylic paint technique. With that in mind, we are asking parents to start saving newspapers for our sculptures. Also, if you have any empty water bottles, paper towel tubes or wire around we can use that for the armature of our paper mâché sculptures. You can start sending those supplies in with your child any time in the next couple of weeks.

See you next week!