Class Project - Family photos

This fall I took a drawing class at the community college where I teach.  It was fun to do the project, but I don't think I learned as much as I could have.  The teacher was very laissez faire.  There was one assignment, to create a series of drawings or paintings or whatever that follow a theme.  The theme I chose was optimism emerging from rural poverty.  I used family photos for the portraits and photos I had taken or found online for the landscape and object paintings. 

"Jane & John"  22 x 30 inches.  charcoal and watercolor on paper

 

"Old and worn" 15 x 22 inches. watercolor on paper

 

"John Jr." 22 x 30 inches.  Watercolor and charcoal on paper.

 

"A Window" 11 x 30 inches.  Watercolor on paper.

 

"Karl" 15 x 22 inches.  Watercolor and charcoal on paper.

 

"Open spaces" 22 x 30 inches.  Watercolor on paper.

 

"Clifford" 15 x 22 inches.  Watercolor and charcoal on paper.

It's hard to get good pictures of the drawings and paintings, but you get the general idea.  The charcoal drawings have light washes of blue and ochre under the charcoal.  This is a little bit difficult to see in the photos.  My favorite painting of this series is the old wood and rust.  I found this reference photo online in the Wet Canvas reference image library.  I also like the skyscape.  This is from a photo I took somewhere along I-80 in northern Nevada.  Definitely wide open spaces.  I think I'll hang this in my husband's office.  The photo for the window painting I took in Idaho looking out of an old hay shed with a broken board. 

I like each of the drawings for different reasons.  Jane looks like she has had a tough life.  John looks like he is about to fade away.  John Jr reminds me of someone out of the Grapes of Wrath, or Gary Cooper, or Will Rogers.  This isn't far from the truth, except they never left the farm.  Karl is the transitional figure.  He left the hard life on the farm to go to college and have a better life.  Clifford is a cute kid in an oversized coat.  In the original photo you can see a shadow of his mom peeking out of the window.

It was a lot of fun and I especially liked using old family photos for the references.  Based on the ages of the people I'm guessing the photos were taken in the late 1920's.  John Sr. and Jane died in 1927 and 1925.  It would have been unlikely that they would have had a camera much before then.

The project was a lot of fun and a lot of work.  I was a little disappointed in the class experience, but the end result was good.

First Day of School

The first day of school!  It was a great, fun, relaxing summer and now the craziness begins again.  The kids are looking forward to school, especially seeing their friends.  For me this means the beginning of early mornings and busy busy busy.

 

Buddy Boys is starting 5th grade, his last in elementary.  My Girl is starting 2nd.  When did they get so big?  I feel like they both grew inches over the summer.

 

Buddy Boy was glad to go back, but I think he enjoyed the leisurely pace of summer.

My Girl was SO excited.  She woke up well before she needed and was positively vibrating with excitement.

The second graders get desks instead of just shared tables.  The girls were so excited about the desks.  It's all they talked about as they were lining up to go into the classroom.

The second day I managed to get a couple more photos of Buddy Boy.  He starts 20 minutes before My Girl so if we are running late he has to pay the price. 

The night before school started I felt like I was in the starting blocks of a race looking ahead to all of the things we will have going on this fall.  It isn't always easy for me or the kids to shift gears.  Over the summer we were staying up late and taking it easy.  My Girl starts soccer along with school.  Add that to music lessons and scouts and our after school hours are full. 

I have a few weeks before I start teaching again.  Once that gets going my days will be full as well.  I will be teaching two 4 hour classes back to back.  It is going to be a long day, but it is just one day and I don't have to teach Saturdays.  I will have my Saturdays back.  My other days are filled with volunteering at the kids' school and art.  I have my regular painting class and I am also trying to get in to the intermediate drawing class.  I'm on the wait list so we'll see.  I took beginning drawing last winter and really want to do more.  I just hope it isn't all too much.

I'm sure that once I get going it will all fall in to place.  I just need to pick up the pace a bit.

The Penguin Project

Every once in awhile I take on something that ends up being a much bigger project than I anticipated.  I just don't always think it through.  This is what happened with the penguin project.

 

In first grade they do a big weeks long project studying penguins.  In the past they have made life sized penguins out of paper for their final project.  This year My Girl's teacher thought it would be fun to make them out of fabric.  She doesn't sew.  I said I would help because I like making stuffies out of fleece.  I wasn't thinking about how much work it would be to make 22 of them.

 

 

The class was divided into expert groups and each group came up with a drawing.  There were emperor penguins, king penguins, gentoo penguins, little blue penguins, and chin strap penguins.  For patterns I used drawings the kids had done.  I simplified and modified them just a bit in some areas, but it was basically the kids drawing.

Grandma and Grandpa were here during Penguin Week so Grandma came to school to help us help the kids cut out the front and back of their penguins.  Most of them did an OK job with this.  It was a lot of cutting for the bigger penguins.  I cut out the details for the front, sewed them onto the white front part then sewed the front to the black (or blue) back.

We then took them to school for the kids to stuff.  They got to watch me sew the bottom up and dew on the button eye.  Most of them had never seen a sewing machine before.

All I can say is that it was a good project to have finished.  I don't regret doing it, but it isn't something that needs to be repeated.  I told the teacher that the value for the amount of work was low.  I felt a little sorry for some of the parents.  A lot of us live in places that aren't that big and these birds take up a lot of room.  My husband even saw one emperor penguin being carried home by a parent on a bicycle.  That would have been quite the sight.

The kids loved them and made me some lovely thank you notes.  They told me what they named them and that they sleep with them.  One even went on vacation with its new family.

Thanks for the help Grandma!

School House Rockn'

Buddy Boy really wanted to try the after school play this year.  He absolutely LOVES scout skits and being on stage so we gave it a try.  They did School House Rock.  It is more of a musical review of great songs loosely tied together with a weak plot so that you can call it a play.  I remember watching the videos on Saturday mornings and being ever so grateful for the Constitution song when I had to memorize the Preamble for High School American History.

We got a CD of the songs they were learning and played it constantly it seemed for months.

The experience with all of the practices run by a grumpy director and crazy narcissistic choreographer at the end of a long school day wasn't all that great, but overall he still had a good time.  It helped that one of his good friends was there with him.  I didn't get any good photos during the performance, but here are a few after shots along with the video of his favorite song.

Happy Halloween

Halloween has come and gone.  It is fun, but sometimes it seems like the never ending holiday.  I'm OK with a Christmas season, but do we really need a whole Halloween season?  Enough complaining.  Here are a few of the things we did.

 

Carving pumpkins is a must.  It is one of the things I like.  Buddy Boy decided to draw his face rather than carve it.  I don't think he wanted to have the pumpkin rot so quickly.

 



Leah and Herobrine.  Princess Leah is pretty recognizable, but Herobrine is only known to the Minecraft demographic.  For the past couple years Buddy Boy has chosen a costume where it is rather difficult to see.  It becomes problematic when we trick-or-treat.  I found a pdf file online of the head graphic and all we had to do was tape it to the right size box and find a plain blue shirt.  We put plastic canvas over the eyes so that they would look white and covered the whole thing with plastic wrap since rain was predicted for the exact time of the costume parade at school.  Luckily it held off until the afternoon, but there were a few drips that would have ruined the ink.

My Girl's costume was pretty simple.  I found a long sleeve hooded t-shirt, sewed a simple skirt, and made a belt with 2" black elastic and called it a day.  The toughest part she took care of.  She's been growing her hair out for months so that she could have nice buns on the sides and no bangs.  The bangs just barely made it.

I'm glad she didn't choose Elsa, the latest Disney princess.  At the school carnival there were so many Elsas a friend had a hard time keeping track of her daughter.

At the church Trunk or Treat there is one family that always goes all out on the costumes.  This year as they were getting out of the car it took me a minute to figure out this year's theme.  They are all captains! (Except Grandma, who is the witch on the end.)  Captain Moroni, Captain Morgan, Captain America, Captain James T. Kirk, Captain Jack Sparrow, and Cap'n Crunch.  Such a fun family.

Each year the teachers at school dress up for the costume parade.  This year they all dressed as idioms.  My Girl's teachers were "two peas in a pod".  There was a smart cookie, a drop in the bucket, raining cats and dogs, Smartie pants, kicking the bucket, hold your horses, and others.  It was fun to figure out what each one was.

 

There were plenty of Minecraft characters in the parade.  I described the different characters to a friend whose son is still a toddler, Steve, Herobrine, Enderman, Zombies, Zombie Pigmen, Skeletons and others.

 

There were several Jedis and Storm Troopers, but there was only one other Leah.

Once the festivities are finally over, what do you do with the decorations?  Feed them to Lucy of course.

Self portraits

Here are a couple of self portraits by My Girl.

life size tracing

surfer girl in action with water dripping from her hair



 

My Girl and her friends are obsessed with fairies.  She reads the Rainbow magic fairy books regularly.  Luckily there are hundreds of them.  Luckily for me she can read them herself.  They are all about the same and I get a little bored.  They play fairies at recess and each have their own fairy name.  I have even been chosen to be Queen Titania, queen of the fairies.  It is quite an honor.  But if you ask her, they aren't "playing" fairies they ARE fairies.  It is quite serious I assure you.  She is also quite clear about the fact that these are the nice fairies, not the tricky, sometimes mean, Irish faeries, with an "e".

 

When they aren't playing fairies it is Rescue Princesses with the addition of one Rescue Prince.

Poetry

During the last week or so of school Buddy Boy's class wrote wish poems.  Here is his.

 

(read from the bottom up sort of)

 

I wish I was

a flying guy

soaring over

the clouds and sky

 

 

 

He has always wanted to fly.

Teddy bears and teeth

The teeth are starting to fall out in bunches it seems.  This is her third one.  Each one is pretty exciting.

 

One of the last activities in My Girl's class was the Teddy Bear Picnic.  Each of the kids brought a bear or other animal for their special potluck picnic.  My Girl always has big idea and wanted teddy bear cookies.  I didn't want to frost 4 dozen bear cookies so I did this instead.  It went pretty quick and worked out great, the kids loved them, no frosting required.  Just make sure the chocolate chip is completely cool.  It stays soft and smeary a lot longer than you think.

 

Science Fair

School has been out for awhile now, but I thought I would go back and recap a few of the highlights of the end of school flurry of activities.

Science Fair:

Each year it's a balance between their ideas and my time, energy, and mess tolerance.  This year was a good year for both.  Science fair in Kindergarten can be a challenge.  It should be their idea, but they don't know that much.  It is easy to recreate something from a book or a website.  Just Google science fair and there are endless projects out there.  That isn't the point.

My Girl wanted to study earthquakes.  After discussing several ideas we decided to look at how well different types of buildings would survive a good shaking, so we built two buildings on a cookie sheet and then shook it gently then harder to see which one fell down first.  We did tall vs. short and hollow vs. solid.  Short and solid win!  The thing that I like best about this is that it was her question and her idea.  I helped out, but it was she was in charge and she loved it.

 



 

Buddy Boy wanted to study the fletching on arrows.  He had read about duct tape fletching in Backwoodsman magazine and different styles of fletching in his weapons book.  Based on our limited archery and fletching skill we narrowed it down to just two styles of arrows, fletched and unfletched, and enlisted the help of a teenager from church who is a pretty good archer.  We then compared the accuracy and the precision of the arrows.  We had three of each type of arrow.  We measured accuracy using the average distance from the center of the target and precision using the perimeter of the triangle made by the three arrow holes.  There was little difference in the accuracy of the arrows, but the fletching did seem to help with the precision.

 

 

 

Unfortunately, Buddy Boy was sick on the day of the science fair and didn't get to present his project to the class.  He did have a good time working on it.

When I was describing our "Fletching Olympics" to Grandma L. she told me about how she used to help her brothers fletch their arrows with chicken feathers.  They had a little jig to get the spacing right and used a wire from the heating element of an old toaster to burn the edges of feathers to get them all the same shape.  I bet that was smelly! We won't be doing that any time soon.

First week of school

The first day and the first week of school have come and gone.  Here are the photos.  Dad and I both went so that I could put my shoes on and take photos as we drove.

Both kids were pretty excited and happy to be going.  Buddy Boy is pretty familiar with the routine by now.  It was good to see his friends greet him on the sidewalk and in the courtyard before school.  Unfortunately most of his friends are in the other class this year, but I seem to mind more than he does. 

It was the big day for My Girl.  Kindergarten is a big step.  She is more than ready, but she was still nervous since she only knows one boy in her current class from preschool.  Many of the other kids are familiar faces from three years of picking up Buddy Boy.  One interesting thing about her class is that it is 2/3 girls and 1/3 boys.  That will either be great for my super-social girl, or not so great if it means lots of girl drama, or most likely, it will be both.  At the end of the first day she had loved it so much that she wanted to go back after dinner.  She just couldn't wait until morning.  I hope the enthusiasm lasts.

For me this means more quiet time at home during the day.  Not completely quiet, since Dad works from home most mornings and some afternoons as well.  Don't worry.  I haven't had a problem filling the hours.  One of my time fillers is my school job working with the Potions Center at school.  Once a week I will be teaching introductory chemistry to small groups of K-2 graders.  I taught this when Buddy Boy was in Kindergarten, now I am one of the two people in charge.  I think this will be fun.  I really enjoyed it last time.  The Potions center is part of one of my two classroom work shifts each week.  I like knowing the kids and what they are doing in class.  It helps me reinforce it at home. 

At the end of September I also start teaching at the nearby Jr. College again.  My first class was last Winter quarter.  This fall I have two classes, one on Friday while the kids are in school and one on Saturday.  They are both the same class I taught last Winter.  I don't mind the teaching, but it sure chews up the weekends.