Friday, February 10, 2006

Bart Simpson's Nostrils

I have been so busy. I have been working very hard on my website. I am partly through a major revamp. When I get done, it wont be very different in appearance to anybody who looks, but it should load faster and navigate better on a variety of monitors.
My son's 4th grade teacher asked me to teach one of their "centers" on watercolor because she says she is not artistic. Considering my experience with watercolors, this is challenging. She has chosen dandelions as the subject, which is a good choice because it is simple. The center lasts 15 minutes on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I get the whole class each day, broken into groups of 12.
I decided on mixed media, since I can break it into three easy steps that they can get done within the correct time. For the first day, I am going to have them rough in their dandelion, and use white crayon to "color" the seed head. I will borrow hub's dremel tool and make plastic templates so the can outline the flower and the seedhead and a couple leaves without having to worry about size.
For the second day they will add watercolor. They only need two colors; yellow and blue. I will have them paint the sky pale blue, then add streaks of darker blue. The seed head will pop out from the wax resist they put down the day before. The flower will be yellow, sprinkled with table salt for texture. The leaves will be green, made from yellow with a bit of blue. They can add bits of blue to the green while it is wet and let it bleed out into the green.
The third day they will add black colored pencil to partly outline the flowers and leaves, and to show the stems.
I made four of these to check out how it would go. They went very fast, less than 10 minutes total for each one. I think I can lead this in 45 minutes. This weekend I have to outline what I will say on each day.
Did you know Bart Simpson doesn't have nostrils? How does that dude breath? You don't have to show every detail to make a good picture.

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