In the Art Room: Beautiful Oops and Barney Saltzberg Visit!

So today a magical surprise happened in the art room: Barney Saltzberg, author of Beautiful Oops dropped by! 

Okay, pick yourself up off the floor and lemme tell you how this amazement went down. 

So this book is every art teacher's dream. It focuses on working through your "mistakes", or oops as Barney calls them, and turning them into something beautiful. This is how creative ideas are born! Isn't this what we art teacherin' types try to teach our young artists everyday? 

So all y'all can only image what a thrill it was to have Barney himself not only read Beautiful Oops to the kids but also talk to them about his creative process. When writing the book, he didn't start with a plan, so to speak, but he created each "oops" illustration and then worked from there. What a perfect method for such a book, don't you think? He shared with us that after illustrating this page, he went into his son's bedroom and saw that he had drawn a similar penguin to the one his son had created! It was so cool to hear his ideas behind each page. 

One of my fave stories he shared was how Amazon stopped shipping his book soon after it was released (don't worry, they've since resumed). Apparently a ton of folks were returning the book because one of the pages is torn and Barney makes an oops out of it. Guess some folk were a lil unclear on the concept and thought they'd received a damaged book!

Y'all might be wondering just how a girl and her students got so lucky. Well, I have Mark Meckel, the dude on the right, to thank for that. You see, last year, my then third grade kids had the opportunity to visit a recording studio and record the song It's a Beautiful Oops. 

Working with Mark and our music teacher, my students learned the lyrics of the song and recorded it in Nashville. 

But the icing on the cake for me was chatting with Barney via Skype that day. So you can only imagine how thrilled I was that he popped by today! Fortunately, when Barney dropped by today, he visited with a fourth grade class, the same group of kids who had sang It's a Beautiful Oops! 

After reading the book, Barney used one of our messy paint mats and created a crazy elephant head sculpture out of it (he named it Elepantish, ha!). Then I passed out the kids sketchbooks and told them to close their eyes and draw a piece of scrap paper from our painted paper box. They were to create something from that oops. I gave them free reign to sculpt, collage, draw, etc. They were thrilled! We spent our last 15 minutes other just oopsing it up!

It was an awesome day, one me and my students are sure not to forget. Thank you, Barney, Mark and Tom! 

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DIY: Halloween Craftin'

Hey, lookie! I created a club! Here are the rules:

1st Rule: You do not talk about the Naughty Kitty Club.
2nd Rule: You DO NOT talk about the Naughty Kitty Club. 

Oh, crap, wait. My bad. That's Fight Club rules. Carry on. Let's talk away about this ultra-photo heavy blog post and this imaginary club I created cuz that's what you do when you're not cool enough to be invited to join a bona-fide club (tho I guess using cheesy terms like "bona-fide" will prolly get you ruled outta just about any club). 

I actually have no idea just how this here needle felted number came to be. It most def wasn't planned. I mean, I'm currently buried under half finished sewing, painting, crafting, art teacherin' projects. So piling one more on top of that Mountain of Mess seemed like such a great idea. You know. I like to use crafting as a means of avoiding unfinished crafting. I'm sure it's how Martha Stewart lives her life. 

Since I'm currently in full-blown Halloweenie mode, I've got a big fat pinterest board bursting with vintage fall images. And images of black cats keep popping up and I'm loving them! Our first cat, Mama, was a sweet black cat and I'm always reminded of her when I see them. 

So, on a whim, in-between 23 other projects, I pulled this rarely worn lace jacket thing from Forever21 outta my closet and set to sketching out my plan. 

I started with this vintage Halloween kitty as my inspo and went from there...

You might notice I later dropped the bow tie as I thought it was two similar to this OTHER needle felted cat ensemble (yes, I've now created two needle felted cat wears. And, yes, I'm completely aware that this makes me a Crazy Cat Lady. Whateves.) After this was drawn, I cut it out and pinned it to the back of my jacket.

Using chalk, I sketched out the circle to go around the cat and started needle felting that part in with a combo of yellow and orange wool roving. Oh! If you'd like to learn more about needle felting supplies, how it's done, the whole thang, go here and check out some crappy videos I made! 

I like using the wool yarn as an outline because it gives me some super hard edges and also allows me to fill in my spaces Paint-by-Numbers style. 

Omg, everytime I see this photo, I think of Donald Trump. Tell me I'm not alone!

The parts of the face came together really fast. I just started outlining and filling it in. 

I tried to limit my color palette so that it had a vintage look to it. Instead of using black for the cat, I have this great roving that is a blend of purples, browns and blue that I thought worked well. 

The eyes proved to be a pinch challenging in that I had to really thing about what colors to use. If I had used black to outline the eyes, they would have disappeared into the background color. So outlining 'em in that deep orange was my solution. 

And, c'mon, I needed a slogan to go with the kitty, right? I was thinking of those jackets the Pink Ladies wore in Grease or the hot pink satin roller skating jacket I had as a kid. I toyed around with a couple of names and this is the one that I liked best.

I managed to get this done in the time it took me to watch Pulp Fiction and Ghostbusters. I'm on a rando retro movie watching bender. Did I mention it's fall break and I have a week off? Yeah, don't hate. 

During a coffee-refueling break, I got sidetracked and made a new table runner! I'm really loving all things mid-century mod right now (like, aren't we all?) and I found this fabric in my stash from Ikea. All it needed was a lil hemming and boom! New runner. I love how well it goes with that Williamsburg marbled platter (a thrifted score, if you can believe!) and the antler and feathers that el hubbo has collected on his hiking trips. 

Still loving the Halloween display. The only good part about taking it down at the end of the month is that it will be replaced by Christmas goodness, yay!

So this is what our table pretty much looked like over those first coupla days of fall break. Peaky Blinders on one laptop, pinterest on the other. Oh, and a Big Fat Frothy Coffee. That's a must. 

A buddy invited me over for a craft night. In preparation, I dug out a coupla old canvases and painted 'em white and then gave them orange stripes. In the end, one became the cat painting and the other as the background for my craft. 

At my buddy's house, we used this air dry clay stuff (I can't recall the name but it wasn't like Model Magic) and I shaped the parts to this Pumpkin Dude.

Once dry, I painted him in that went over him with some watered down brown acrylic paint. That was brushed quickly off to leave an antiqued-ish look behind.

Then I shoddily put him together with some wire and glued him to the canvas. The prob? He blended into the canvas too much, says me.

 So I lightened the orange lines with some watery acrylic and added the vertical stripes. Done! AND I just realized both he and the cat are winking. What the what? Am I on some sort of winking kick? Are they both missing an eye? Do they have an eye-winking twitch? 

All I know is that guy ain't winkin' fer sheeeeeet. Pumpkin! Get off my a$$!

Oh and then there was this painting. So, the back story on that crazy texture is that I painted that in oils a million years ago. The colors I used were horrid but the texture was cool. So I painted over that in watery creme, added the stripes and started busting out this witch. I have NO IDEA how to finish this beast but I'll keep you posted. 

 The texture has me really excited tho. 

 UGH. Speaking of beasts, this bad boy has been on my easel for a while now. I thought it would be so easy to bust out. Turns out it's taking foreverness. I'm determined to finish before the 31st, y'all. It's gonna happen. 

Unless I get distracted and make another jacket, that is. Oui! I think instead of the Naughty Kitty Club, I should change the name to Messy ProCATinator's Club. Tho it just don't have the same ring to it, does it?

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In the Art Room: Houses to Help, a Compassionate Fundrasier

I think that teaching compassion and kindness is one of the most important and most difficult things to do. I mean, you can remind the kids to be kind, considerate and thoughtful until you're blue in the face but until you actually show 'em how and let them know the positive effects, it's almost impossible. 

Recently, the kids in my room were talking about an apartment fire that had happened the night before. Thankfully no one was hurt but many of my students were aware of the incident because it happened in their complex. One of our families was effected and lost much due to the fire. 

While the kids were talking about it, I thought it would be a good time to do a compassionate fundraiser with the kids. I try to do one every year where artwork is "sold" to parents at a price they chose to give and the money going toward a specific cause. One year, we did the Empty Bowls thing and raised close to $2000 for a local homeless shelter. Another year, we sold our animal clay sculptures with the proceeds going toward a local humane society. These have always been a success however...there was always a disconnect. The children never visited the humane society or the shelter. They never actually witnessed the positive effects of their efforts nor did they have a connection to the shelter or the humane society. 

And that's when I got the idea for my third and fourth grade students to help the family effected by the fire. They have both a connection with the family and the apartment. When I brought the idea up to the kids, you could have heard a pin drop. They were so excited that they might be able to use their art to help a family, that they knew, in need. 

The idea for these houses was not my own. You might recall the Houses for Haiti effort from several years ago. We used the same concept. I chopped up scrap painted papers into 2" X 2" squares. The kids were to pick any two squares, one for the house, the other for the roof. Rotating one square to a diamond, folding in half and cutting along the line, they had a triangle roof. From there, they were allowed to use scrap papers, glue, Sharpie markers and paint to decorate their houses. They had free range and were told they could make as many as they liked in the 15 minutes we had remaining in the class period. Most kids created one but I had several that were in it to win it and were busting 'em out factory style. "I want to make a bunch to raise a bunch of money," I was informed by one fourth grade girl. 

Once complete, I hot glued a 2" X 2" piece of card stock to the back of the house as well as a magnet. For some reason, I have a trove of magnets in that pit I call a storage closet. Which means this craft was free to make, yay!

I created a little tag to go along with the houses. We put them up for "sale" in the teacher's lounge with a suggest price of $1 after much price bickering by the kids. I left my signs, the houses and a box for money in the lounge that I checked at the end of everyday. I don't think a single person paid a dollar based on how much money we raised. 

 The houses were just irresistible! 

 The artist behind this house is usually one of my first-finishers...but not this time. He was dedicated to crafting a detailed and unique house that was sure to sell.

 I love the stained glass look of this one.

To know the impact their art made, I left this in the lounge so that the teachers could write notes to the kids. This meant so much to the young artists. 

Have I told you lately how much I love the people I work with? Talk about kind and considerate!

In addition to this effort, my school also hosted a spirit night at a local restaurant to raise funds. Our magnets raised just over $150 for the family. Oh! And I also shared an image of this project on Facebook and received a half dozen letters in the mail with money for magnets as well! If you are interested in purchasing a magnet, just leave a message in the comments and I'll be sure to get in touch with you. Thank you!

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