Time Out for Tie Dye

One of my lovely talented art teaching colleagues hosted a shibori workshop for us after school Monday. Here are the fabrics I made.

Third Grade Art

We're studying warm colors this week. They're my favorites. Last week was the scourge of the cool colors - blue bores me, purple scares me and green? That's for beans. I will use certain flavors of redviolet and yellowgreen. I'm not rigid.

So the point was to identify and use only warm colors in a drawing. Draw with heavy crayon marks first, then paint with watercolor. The crayon is a resist. You can paint right over it and the line emerges. We use the good German watercolors, none of those Prang 8 pan oval sets for my students.

After mine was dry, later in the day, I added some deeper watercolor hues, waited for that to dry and then added the black marker lines. the 12" x 18" size is something I never use in real life. It's for school only.

What's the difference?

What's the difference between good and great?

Fire, passion and soul.

But what about talent? Isn't that important?

The happiest people are the ones with a passion for their talent.

The people who irritate me the most are the ones with loads of talent and no passion.

Color!

These are a couple of pages from that brown paper sack book I showed you a while back. I really like these colors together. Springtime!

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!

Back to normal?

It was sunny and fifty-three degrees here today, so most of the Big Snow & Ice from 2 weeks ago is finally gone. Tomorrow will be the first Monday we have gone to school on time since January 12. Our school corp has a 2-hr delayed start on extremely cold or slightly slick mornings so we can avoid as many outright cancellations as possible. We have not a full 5-day 8 to 3 everyday week since the week of December 8 -12, with bad weather and Christmas break in there. We have had 7 snow days and I hope no more. We have to make them up and I really don't want to be in school in June!

Both Destiny and Jessica are out of the hospital and Destiny is back in school. Jessica will start back sometime this week. It is such a relief to everybody to see them back home.

Art? Do I still do that? yes - here and there. I am nearing completion of my first book of this year's challenge and finding myself asking a lot of questions about what I REALLY think a livre d'artist should be. I talk to myself about the best way to put text into a book ALL THE TIME and I keep coming back to this idea:

What is the benefit of the process? I am trying to get rid of the extraneous, fluffy, show-offy bits and get right to the heart of what the words SAY, not how they are put onto the pages. The way I get the words on the page should only support the message...? What about the overall aesthetic of the piece? See what I mean? never ending