Piggin' Out

Karen from Pixels & Paintbrushes at Southfield Christian informed me that her students recreated my piggy lesson that I created based on Painted Paper's painted pigs....

They included QR codes with stories- so cool!

Passing it on... Liebster Blog Award

Thanks Christie at Fine Lines!!!

She passed on the Liebster Blog Award to me last week and I apologize for the belated passing on but here you go!

The goal of this award is to introduce blogs with less than 200 followers. So this morning I went through some of the blogs that I follow to select a few to pass on to my readers.

The requirements are that you please:
1. Copy and paste the award on your blog
2. Thank the giver and link back to them
3. Reveal your top 5 picks and let them know by leaving a  comment on their blog
4. Spread our love of art to other bloggers

Here are five blogs that are growing and offer great resources!

1. Don Masse at  Zamorano Arts

2. Ms. Keller at Splish Splash

3. Mrs. VanBush at Green Bay

4. Sarah at Chucks & Crayons

5. Ms. Mazzuto at Art, Paper, Scissors

Cityscape Snowglobes

Kindergarten cityscape snowglobe collages. 

These are a pretty good size- the globe part is about about 12" in diameter.

Now you can see what we did with our latest watercolor and salt experiment. 

These were done in 3 parts:

1- cityscape drawing on 6 x 9" grey construction paper

2- watercolor washes with salt on 4.5 x 9" 80 lb paper

3- white crayon snowflake drawings with water color resist 

and a few crumpled tissue paper snow balls

Salty Times

Just an FYI... I am attempting to re-enact my popular Majestic Mountains / Aurora Borealis lesson with my fifth graders. For those of you who attempted to do this project and could not get the same result with the watercolor manipulation I wanted to share a few tips. 

(I did not use Saran wrap to create a texture this time 

because I forgot to bring it to work so we just did salt today- I love the saran wrap though.)

However- to get these color combinations---

I specifically use the leftover purple/brown/black (and blue if there is any left) which end up being the leftovers at the end of the watercolors and are perfect for mountains--- from the crappy Prang non-refillable watercolors that I have bought by accident a few times. For some reason I do not understand- if you sprinkle salt on their black paint it creates a pink crystallization effect specifically with this type of paint. 

I also used 90lb paper instead of watercolor paper this time and it worked just fine. 

So there you have it- I'm revealing my sources... 

I will report back soon with how my second go at the gorgeous mountain project turns out. 

winter display & happy hands

Thank you to Painted Paper! I was inspired by her Fairy Tale Forest trees made out of hand cut-outs.

Each of my K & 1 classes got to make a class hand tree to be incorporated into two hallway winter wonderland collaborations.

I didn't use cones for mine- the kids did watercolor resists and cut out two hands. 

I stapled them all together to make an Evergreen-like tree for each class.

Each class helped do a little something for the displays as well (did rubbings for the trunks, collaged snowballs, made snowman parts, collaged clouds, cut snowflakes, etc.)

The displays are not quite finished but here is a peak: