Thursday, November 7, 2013

Thursday Art Club #3: Beneath the Autumn Tree


Every Thursday I have an Art Club with a crazy group of about twenty 1st-5th grade kids. It's definitely not an art "class," but I think they learn something every time.

Today we made a perspective drawing of a tree in the fall, with yellow, orange, and red leaves.

Tree by Amanda, age 8

We started with a brief bit of directed art, drawing a black tree that narrows at the top, with silhouetted branches extending. Then the kids used stamp pads and crumpled tissue (Ran out of stamps. Oops!) to paint the fall leaves above.



The kids really got into it, creating halos of color to crown their tree that they painstakingly filled in. Luckily I was the only one who got a Sharpie headache.

In the end, there were plenty of black permanent marks to clean off the tables, and stamp ink EVERYWHERE, spreading to everything they touched! I had to follow them around with Clorox wipes to minimize the damage. I never really know just how messy a project will be until I'm already in the middle of it. But seeing how proud they were of their trees really made it worth it. Really.


And, I got a little surprise from a second-grader who's been at every art club session I've held for the past year:

Aww. Totally worth the Sharpie headache.


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