Handmade holidays

There are just a couple spots left in the Tuesday afternoon art class for  ages 12-15. Find the description and registration info here.

Festive and fun, hand carved, original relief prints for this years Christmas cards.

Kids winter art classes

Winter classes are posted here. Classes are small and fill up quickly!

The fall session is all wrapped up. Here's a few highlights…

American graffiti artist Keith Haring, was the inspiration for our first project of the fall session. Students worked in teams to trace each other and then filled in the negative space painting  as many different types of lines as they could think of. 

Kids in this class ranged in age from 5-8. Awesome work!

I wish we had the space to hang these all together.

A fun and successful lesson on line, positive and negative space.

 

I had to take advantage of all the beautiful fall colours.

After careful observation of our beautiful leaves, we discussed the organic forms and free flowing colors in the leaves and compared them to repeated structured patterns we had been creating in other projects. We also talked about the color wheel, warm and cool colors and complimentary colors. Not just a pile leaves!

Step 1: Oil pastel rubbings to get the outline of our leaves.

Step 2: Working wet on wet with liquid acrylic inks.

Step 3: Sprinkle salt onto the wet blue background ink and let them dry.

One of my favorite fall projects are pumpkin paintings inspired by Brazilian artist Romero Britto. 

Students had a restricted color palette and were encouraged to mix their colors to achieve a wide range of warm colours. I often have returning students, so we had substituted an apple for a pumpkin and changed the color palette to keep the project fresh.

Ta Da!

Some of the positive and negative paper cut outs put together for a striking graphic! 

One hour of art goes by very quickly and often i do not have time to take pictures! Luckily one student had held on to all the books we had me made this session and I got a quick shot. 

Kids art class: Relief printmaking

Ready to carve! I have the students first sketch out a few possible ideas. We discuss what will work best as relief print and make adjustments to the drawing. A simple drawing with about a 50/50 ratio of positive and negative space. 

Clearly mark out the areas. Carving is fun and its easy to get carried away!

Roll, burnish, print...repeat.

Pick a colour any colour!

Rainbow rolls...

Just keep printing...

An edition of original prints.

Painting a Still Life

Just a couple weeks before the fall session starts. Classes are almost full with a nice balance of returning students and new students. Here some shots from  the 9-12 year olds acrylic painting day of summer camp. 

Our fresh from the garden still life. The palette of colours is careful chosen so that we can learn about cool colours, tints and shades.  

The first step is a quick sketch in pencil crayon to establish a composition and correct proportions.

students are then ready to block out the main shapes with colour.

Love the variety of brush strokes and colours.

Art Camp: Handmade books

Fall art classes begin September 26th. Sign up today.

Here's some hi-lights from the middle school book-arts camp that took place earlier in the summer.

Collaging cards lesson is all about choosing a colour palette and creating a composition.

I LOVE paper...

The collection for the week included a Japanese stab bound journal, a pamphlet style binding, an accordian fold book, small match book notebooks and cards.

Creating lines and textures with the sewing machine.

We used my embossing gun and metallic powders for adding details to covers and cards. 

Handcarved wooden blocks from India.

Match book style notebooks were a big hit. Zero waste!

View from the loft...

Making color wheels

We just wrapped up an amazing week of art camp.  The studio was full of 6-8 year olds in the morning and middle school students in the afternoon.

My daughter's new bicycle has been the inspiration for many art projects this year. This was a great project to start off our week. After some careful observational drawing we turned the tires into colour wheels.

 Primary colours, secondary colours....

 Warm colours, cool colours....

...and then we mixed some tints to finish the paintings.

Summer Camps have a few spots open...

 Summer Camps at Studio-Kids have a few spots open. Register today!

Poofy loves to pose, Poofy loves to be pet... 

 Life drawing with Poofy...

Poofy poses patiently for pastel portraits.

Painting tints and shades

Summer Camps are now registering. Click here for all the details.

First lesson in my acrylic painting class. Tints and shades with the Seattle skyline. 

   

Seattle on a typical grey day.

A painterly Seattle through rose tinted glasses!

Another nice range of colours.

Time to register for Summer Camp!

Summer Camps are now registering and they fill up lickidy split!

Click here for the details.

Spring is full swing here at Studio-kids. Just a couple shots from 6-8 year old class. We started our paintings with wet on wet water colour so that our green and blue would blend together.

   While our paintings dried in the sun we went out to the garden to pick a a few branches from the apple tree. After some close examination of the branch structure we started painting. We noticed the branch was very wiggly and resembled the letter Y. Best approach was to paint the branch very slowly with our non dominate hand to get it nice and shaky!

 Dark pink, light pink and white to dip our brushes in, then quick gestural strokes. Voila! Blossoms!

The tulips are blooming!

It is spring in Seattle and my garden is going crazy. I like to edit the still life so that students can can do some careful observation for their compositions.  I was hoping for a traditional closed tulip for my printmaking class but after 30 minutes in the water, this happened!

This week we made some beautiful Monoprints.

 After printing their plates, students did another image using the same plate and the ghost image that remained. The gradual build up of layers has beautiful results.

 These 3 would be gorgeous framed and hanging together!

Tools of the trade, the humble q-tip.