Car Art Class Drawing Project

Hey, everyone! I am super excited to share a new art project I tried towards the end of the semester in honor of Father's Day for parents or art teachers who may be interested in having their children do this project. I found that my students really enjoyed it, and they did an amazing job. I am so proud of their hard, beautiful work! I only have photos of some of the artworks, but I was really impressed. These were made by my kindergarten-fourth graders. 

I used a car calendar from the dollar store and had them vote on a class favorite. The calendar had vintage and sports cars. I gave them two options: they could design their own car with no help (maybe even their Dad's or his favorite kind), or they could follow along with a step-by-step I did on the board. I don't usually do step-by-step art tutorials because I like their artwork to be creative and original, but those who did follow along colored their cars different colors and designed them how they wanted. Plus, this tutorial helped them break a detailed image into shapes and lines, as well as showed how to draw something three-dimensional. The backgrounds were made in advance by marbling the paper in shaving cream and food dyes. Terms I taught during this project were warm versus cool colors and proportion.  

I hope to share more art projects soon. I hope this art project/Father's Day gift idea useful! 

-Lauryn 

Colorful, Modern Boho Mother's Day Party (2023)

 

Good morning, happy Wednesday! This event and long past relevant, but maybe this theme can be applied to summer events. This year for Mother's Day I did a colorful, boho theme with a mainly complimentary color palette featuring bright blues, orange, yellow, gold and brown. I struggled to come up with a theme and actually choose these colors and this theme when I was inspired by a design on a tee shirt from my church (which had the same font as the calligraphy on my 'Best Mom' sign below). For favors, I used car scent candles and tea bags. The flower balloons (which you may recognize from my past parties, I've re-used them a lot this year) were from Walmart and were around $3 for four, I think. 

Instead of sharing it as a separate post, I went ahead and included a quick Mother's Day gift idea below since it had matched the party. The pictures are pretty self-explanatory and these types of basket fillers might be helpful for birthdays, too. I got the lama/alpaca succulent planter from Ingles, the stickers came from a bulk teacher set I bought on Amazon, and everything else from Dollar General. 

I hope you enjoyed this post, and look forward to sharing more content soon! 

-Lauryn 

James Turrell Light Art Class Party (2023)

 

Hey guys, I hope everyone is having a great summer! It's been way too long since I've touched this blog, but I'm hoping to share a few new event themes from this year and art projects I enjoyed making with my students this past semester. Today I'm sharing an art theme inspired by the Light and Space Movement, an art movement I was actually newly introduced to. I discovered it when my art appreciation class was learning about modern art movements and we had covered all of the main art movements from prehistoric to contemporary art, and I was researching lesser known but impactful movements. Basically, these artists considered light and space their art 'mediums' and made works that simply focused on and sometimes changed our interactions with light and space, making viewers consider them in a new way (or should I say in a new light). My students love Van Gogh, but I already themed art class parties on Van Gogh/Starry Night, so I wanted a new theme. One of my three students in that class expressed special interest in James Turrell, an artist who made light installations, and they all appreciated his works, so that was my theme. The student who enjoyed his work most made the one-pager poster on the whiteboard, shown below. 

For supplies I ran to Walmart the night before and found blue tie-dye balloons for around $1.50, bought white balloons, and made a balloon arch the morning of. I printed some of his works to stick on the board. I had some transparent plastic paper on hand and cut out a '2023' with that, layered construction paper ovals behind it, and at the back I attached a dollar tree button light that I had on hand to make it glow. I cut out geometric shapes used in his works to place below with the extra plastic paper. The best part was a light I found at Walmart for $10. It was pricey, but I thought it could be used as a gift or something after and I loved it so much that I ended up keeping it. My students loved it too, so I am going to use it in my classroom for future occasions. It was a small, plug-in light that moves the light in water-like motions at various speed settings, can change colors, and is super relaxing, so I had that lighting up the ceiling and walls during the class parties. 

For my end-of-the-year gifts this year, I ordered photos of individual students and class photos to send home, wrote letters on the back and made an acronym of positive adjectives for each student. I order bulk large stickers (the kind for laptops, water bottles and such) of animals and Bible verses to put inside, but the acronyms took so long, I ended up having students pick out their own three stickers. 

I hope this party theme and these class gift ideas are helpful for other art teachers and art enthusiasts. Thank you for visiting!

-Lauryn 

DIY Teacher Valentine Gift Idea + Art Class Valentines for Students

 This is a bit late, but here are some Valentine's Day gift and card ideas I created this year for my teacher colleagues and students. Some of the student cards are themed around artworks/artists, such as the middle school ones, which had a Howard Finster pun since we've been studying GA folk art. I found an artwork of Mark from the Bible to go with my markers and marker pun for my second graders. I used sweet treat artwork by Wayne Thiebaud for some of my lower school student gifts. Some of the gift tags just had a pun and I handwrote them. For the teachers, I bought containers of Valentine's Day donuts, put two in each bag, and separately packaged soap roses I fond at a local store in bulk. The poem I wrote for them is below on the free printable, but if you needed to change the wording like the word "colleague" or do different gifts, I made my tags in the Paint program most computers come with. I shopped all over and the stores all kept running out of supplies, so I had to do different things for each class. I gave glitter pens to my first grade class (since they all love glitter) and ice cream pens, chalk markers and chalk tags to my second grade class who expressed interest in using chalk markers, Sharpies or special pens with glitter glue sticks or rainbow pens for my third-to-seventh grade students, note sets with cats or dogs for my high school small group members, and stacked highlighters for my art appreciation class. I decorated my classroom with a balloon arch you may recognize from the party I recently posted (it was still put together, too, which saved a lot of time), and gave the option of spending the Monday before Valentine's Day creating Valentine's cards or drawing animals holding hearts in art class. I unfortunately did not really photograph the beautiful works before I sent them home. 

Free Printable Cards:

I hope you enjoyed these free printable cards and find the Valentine's Day ideas handy for next year! 

-Lauryn