Wednesday, February 13, 2019

Painting Workshops

Our painting workshop continued with two options for painting today: printing with the paper towel tubes at the low table and painting with our mixed-colors at the easel. Lou Lou, Grace, and Tegan worked with printing. Caleb and Lou Lou chose to paint on large paper at the easel. The color white was added today and it was a popular choice in both the printing and easel panting. Caleb said, "You know why I want black paper? Because white will look good on black."

While Caleb painted, he made other remarks about color and contrast, "Oooh pink, that's my favorite," and, "of these colors, the pink and the green are bright and the black is dark." "You know how I got this color? (The mustard color at the bottom of his painting.) I mixed orange and white."

Lou Lou worked for a long time on her painting, first filling one large painting, and then beginning a second which she plans to attach to the first when she is finished. While working, Lou Lou explained some of her process, "I need Blue...I'm making a sunset. It (the painting) needs lots and lots of red because it (the sunset) has lots of red. And then, it just needs a sun. Once I saw a sunset on Gibson Island. I want to hang this on my house at Gibson Island." ​

Fabulous Fashion

As our fashion-inspired designs continue to spark an interest for the children, Grace and Louise decided to continue working on their designs today. Tegan, who returned this week from her vacation, was just beginning her design and spent much time experimenting with how the materials work. She hand-sewed part of her design and gave Louise feedback when trying to solve a problem. Another example of working together to create the designs happened when Louise asked Grace, "Can you hold this while I clip it?" Grace agreed, "Yes." Children used various strategies including Grace who used wire to go through holes on jewelry and then wrapped the wire around the figure. Louise sewed a paper cupcake liner onto the figure and clipped earrings onto netting. When adding the jewelry, Louise said, "She's going to wear this when she's getting ready for the ball." Later, looking at Grace's design that now included pieces of jewelry, Louise declared, "Oooh...expensive!"

Valentine Messages

At the end of our time together yesterday, the children brought up the idea of making messages for the Brown Room children. So today we prompted the children with a list of Brown Room friends and suggested they make messages for our youngest St. John's friends.

Louise: "I'm making a message for Maren."
Lou Lou: "I'm making one for Emilia because she's my friend."
Tegan worked on a few Valentine messages: "I made for Ada, Alexandra, and Lane." 

We're planning to continue our messages for Brown Room tomorrow and can't wait to hear how they love them!