Beautiful Text

This is the wipe-off board in my classroom; a shot of the layers of erased instructions over a few weeks. I find it beautiful and mysterious.

A Couple Collaboration

My partner Lance and I have been working on this large mosaic collage all winter. We haven't even been dating for a year, but wanted to work on a piece together. It was his idea, and his stamps donated to the cause. We conceived of the design together, and executed it together. Most of the time we worked on it at the same time. Only once or twice did we work on it without the other right there. It was a great communication boot camp for our relationship. We shared ideas, shot them down, offered others, and discovered how similar or dissimilar our collage methods seemed to be. I am proud of us. We'd love to sell it and go toast our artistic teamwork!

Update: The piece is hanging at Instant Karma, a fantastic local Joplin restaurant. And the piece sold!

Robot Portraits

Sometimes I get so bored teaching the same class dozens of times, so I'll throw out the day's curriculum to try something new. Portraiture is common in grade school art, but not ROBOT portraits! I gave my teacher ed students a 12x18" piece of white paper, and instructed them to walk around and "collect" textures by doing rubbings with crayons. Then they cut out basic shapes and created these fun creatures. I showed them a pin from Pinterest of vintage Russian robots. As they worked, I noticed they had extra rubbings, so encouraged them to do a collaborative robot on larger paper. Each student had to add one piece to the new robot. I think it turned out well. Seeing them all on the wall, the project begs for extension: naming of the robots, discussions about personality and expression, writing prompts galore. I think it would be fantastic to follow up with a 3D project, too. Trying to create a small robot out of wood pieces, or model magic. 

Delaunay Collaborative Grids

I hosted the annual K-12 art show at our MSSU Gallery, and invited the participating art teachers to do a section of a Robert Delaunay paining. There were a few left to do, so I took them to KC and let my nephews finish it off. Here's the resulting piece. Oil pasted on black construction paper. 42x46"

Then I took the same instructions to one of my teacher education classes, and they did a smaller version:

It's fun to use the same image several times. I'll probably do this one more time at Nelliepalooza this weekend, a huge retreat of arts, crafts, and girl time.

Got the PDF grid at a fantastic art blog: http://www.artprojectsforkids.org/