Its a beach watercolor

Another great turnout for the Wednesday Arts & Crafts class! We used washable tempra paints to create watercolor beach scenes. This paint is great! It acts just like watercolors on the paper letting us make wave crests with Q-tip rub outs and blending colors on the beach. We used salt to give the sandy effect. One of the guys even put a shark fin by the wave that the surfers were trying to catch!

Students paint Van Gogh

What a group! The students have mixed colors and used pallete knives and brushes to recreate "Starry, Starry Night" yesterday afternoon. They have forged through several projects and have no hesitation drawing or experimenting with color. Of course, when we did our review of the artist's work they voted Van Gogh's sunflowers down in favor of the ones done by Monet on the blue background. Some of the Picturing America prints were determined to be "very realistic" or "borring!" The group really liked the Tiffany window and the story behind it. Ditto for the story behind the "Starry, starry night" painting. If you look in the corner of the lower photo you can see some of the sunflower drawings.
Today we are doing folk art designs on pots and a forest watercolor. More pictures and thoughts later.

Animal banks from recycled juice bottles HUGE success!

Well here is my piggy bank that used to be a juice bottle but it certainly was not the cutest one at the class last night! With almost 50 people in the room, we turned juice bottles, folgers coffee containers, creamer bottles and 1 liter water bottles into a great array of dogs (with and without leashes), cats, bunnies, pigs, space creatures and others. We used the masive amounts of fabric that has been donated to us and lots of glue, but that just doesn't say it at all. Many of the animals had great floppy ears, some sported belts or scarves. I didn't see any jewelry but I suspect that a few even had that. What a great creative outlet this was for all the families that attended. I only wish I had picture of all of the great bottles. Makes you think twice about throwing anything out but my husband would like to see some of it go! I put a call out for more bottles so we can do something like this again.