Bird Songs

I love kids art work! Aren't these birds wonderful?
After a short line drawing demonstration on birds, Caleb, Liam and Thomas used tempra paint to color them. They added wing, beak and leg details and some of them added head and tail feather details. At the very end, I brought out a box of feathers and they added them into the wet paint.

Let's Dance

I love the Day of the Dead and the opportunity for all souls, living or not, to get together and celebrate life! I'm hosting a Día de los Muertos workshop for some little artists I know and this is the format, and my sample for the class.

I can't wait to see what gets created!

Getting Goulish

These pieces look really cool in person!
Click on them for a closer up view.
I love these kids and I love having them in my studio with me.
I really do!
Now that I've been opening up my studio for over a year now, I think I'm really getting the hang of preparing projects, scheduling, and setting up the studio.

These skulls literally glowed after those little fingers
burnished the oil pastels into the black paper.

Thank you Nelson, Clara, Caliope,
Caleb, Audrey, Cecilia, Maia,
Annie, Ilana, Kevin, David,
Iesha, and dear Zarinah,
and all your
wonderful parents.

Love these kids!

I started by plucking this pumpkin out of our front yard and had the kids sketch it in pencil. Then we used our powers of observation and added the ridges, stems and dead leaves.

Next we added surface detail with oil pastels, showed a foreground, middleground and background. Then we used watercolors and washed the pieces, creating a wonderful texture as the water resisted the oil.

I thought I might be raising the bar too high on this project with the techniques and materials I offered, but no! These kids dove right in, stretched themselves and finished pieces that were so good that the hair stood up on my neck a few times.

Just look at their faces! (And their work!!)

Look how happy and proud they seem!

I'm so glad that I could help them create these pieces.

Annie said "Mine looks as good as yours does Mom!"