Arts Festival

Last weekend was the annual Arts Festival in our district. It was a fun day of crafts, artwork, and musical performances, and a great opportunity for the schools to get together and showcase some student work! Here are some photos of my fellow art teachers' work..

Middle school - love the colors on the Picasso portraits! Really neat origami dragon in front too..

Beautiful middle school drawings. The sign language names on the bottom are FIFTH GRADE...wow!

Egyptian display from my "sister" elementary school - she spends weeks and weeks on this and it shows!

And lastly, my small display of pumpkins and Day of the Dead skeletons  :)

Pumpkins Galore!

Here is a small bulletin board I made for my 4th grade oil pastel pumpkins! We talked about how to use line, shape, color, form, and space to make our pumpkin look more realistic. They did a beautiful job and a lot of them were so shocked on how well they did! The only qualm I have is: THE CORNER SUN!!!! I even mentioned to them how we are in 4th grade now and we should be thinking more creatively and do not need to put the sun in the corner, if including one at all. Alas, I shook my head as I saw many corner suns being drawn in anyway. The massive sunset was also a popular choice...ahh well.

And here is a batch of pumpkin cookies I baked up  :)

Happy Halloween, everyone! Hope your kiddies weren't as hyped up as mine were today!

Adventures in Screen Printing!

So one project I have wanted to try this summer is screen printing. My boyfriend has some ideas for starting up a t-shirt company..we'll see!

Mind you, screen printing is something I have never taken a class on whatsoever through my fine arts training. I have done just about every other type of printmaking, but never screen printing. So I decided to purchase a kit at the local Michael's. It included a screen, a squeegee, some ink, screen filler and drawing fluid, and photo emulsion and the remover for it.

I tried the most basic of screen printing, just by making a paper stencil with an x-acto knife, and that didn't really work out. The ink didn't seem to want to go through the screen and the stencil onto the paper (I think I used too thick of paper?). The photos below are from the blocking out method with screen filler. My friend created a logo in Photoshop, I printed it out, stenciled it lightly with a pencil onto the screen, and then filled in around it with a paintbrush and the screen filler. This came out WAY better than the stencil! I am still learning, and these are nowhere near perfect, but here are some photos!

 Original stencil on the screen

 Stencil test on paper

 Stencil onto a cheap-o t-shirt. I didn't tape the whole screen and went too far down with the squeegee, so that's what the blue line at the bottom is. :( Also, I think next time the logo needs to be much bigger to fill the t-shirt.

Does anyone out there know a lot about screen printing?? Any tips?? All of the instructions I seem to find on the internet are more for doing it in a t-shirt shop and not handmade. Help!! :)

First Post

Hello, Blog World!

This is my first post and I am very excited to be starting a Blog of my own. I just finished my first year as an elementary school (grades 1-4) Art Teacher in Massachusetts. I absolutely love my job and I feel very lucky to not only have a job doing what I love, but also a beautiful classroom with great kids!

I have been watching the art teacher blogging community throughout this past year getting ideas and watching other teachers share lessons and advice. Now that is it Summertime, I finally have time to start a blog of my own! I hope to post photos of student work, lesson plan ideas, and general teaching trials and tribulations.

Please check back for my many projects I have planned for this Summer!  :)