Matisse Room Collages

These are the collages my students did while studying Matisse today. I am so impressed with their creativity and their desire to make something beautiful. We never even got to the second project. They worked on these for almost three hours, and it shows!

Upside-Down Jelly

Meet the Masters

I took a break today to do some sample projects for art camp. Basically I spent all day in an elementary/middle school art class...so fun! I can't wait to explore the works of O'Keeffe, Picasso, the Renaissance, Matisse, and Klee with the kids.

More Color

I think these two are done...time for some more sketches. I picked up some kids' books from the library with great reference photos, so hopefully that will help my process.

Color

When I was younger, I hated water colors. They take a good deal of planning, precision, and patience. Since I saw all three of these disciplines as cramping my style, I buried my watercolors in the back of a drawer somewhere. Then a friend introduced me to watercolor pencils and they were the perfect compromise between my beloved drawing tools and the tedious paints. With the jellyfish, I am trying on a technique called glazing where one color is painted on and allowed to dry and then another color is painted lightly over the top. I'm having a lot of fun exploring and I even dug out my old set of "grown-up" watercolors this afternoon.

Jellies 3 and 4

These pieces are requiring more work than the other two. I think it might be because my reference photos weren't as good. Tomorrow I'll probably put them aside and start adding color to the first ones. I plan to do some smaller test runs first since I always find the line work comes more naturally to me than the color.

Jelly 2