DIY: Paintbrush Gnomes! Or Santas! Or Bearded Dudes! Your choice!

Last weekend was our annual art teacherin' Christmas party where we do a little drinking, dining, ornament swapping and crafting. Exactly two days before I was to host the event, I had no idea what we were gonna make. Nothing like procrastination to get the wheels turning, right?

 I have exactly a million old crusty paintbrushes that I just cannot bear throwing away. So, with those in mind, I decided to have our craft be Paintbrush Gnomes! Or Santas...or bearded dudes resembling my husband. Whatever you wanna call them, it doesn't really matter. I mean, look at this epic cuteness. And, good news, they are so super simple to make. Here, let me show you how:

One thing I failed to mention in the clip is that I created the faces, popped them into the toaster oven, painted and then put them back in to speed up the paint drying process. Probably not something I would recommend unless you got that heat down on to a low 200 and you keep a close eye out. Nobody wants their kitchen smelling like burnt gnome hair.

 Here's a little peak at the brushes created at my craft night before they went into the oven. So cute!

 And here's how they looked when they came out! Also what I didn't share in the clip is that the yarn was added by just yarn bombing the part above the ferrel and attaching with hot glue. 

 I love how silly and fun each one came out, don't you?

 And so you can make them all year round, call 'em Paintbrush Gnomes! I want to make them into the new Quiet Critter for my art room. Noiseless Gnomie, if you will. 

So if you need a fun craft for winter break, here you go! Have fun, y'all!

In the Art Room: Weaving with First Grade

Teaching weaving was one of those things I dreaded my first year teaching. I got a C on a weaving project in college because I was certain that my professor would never notice that I'd missed a warp string, causing a large runner to snake it's way through my weaving. So when I saw weaving in my curriculum, I was not thrilled. 

It also didn't help that I had a first grade boy shout, "I'm NOT WEAVING. It's FOR GIRLS."

Here's the funny part: days later, he was the best weaver in class and years later, I wrote a book on fiber arts for kids. Go figure! 

Last week, my first graders and I spent a couple of art classes learning about abstract art. We enjoyed listening to Peter and the Wolf while using our oil pastels to create a line for each character in the symphony. The following day, we listened to the whole record while using watercolor paint to create. You can see a similar lesson here. And if you'd like to see the lesson I taught for abstract painting last year, here you go:

After our day of painting, we turned our paintings into looms for weaving. Here is how we did just that:

 If you would prefer to see more of a blog post on this, visit this! Also, this video might show more about paper weaving:

Or this!

When introducing weaving, this giant paper loom comes in so handy! I made it years ago from laminated bulletin board paper. 

And in just 30 minutes, my students had completed their weavings! It was a record!

 I love them with their abstract paintings. Now...dreaming of ideas of where we take these next. 

I've done a variety of weaving lessons with paper weavings from owls to hearts. Be sure and click on those links for more ideas!

School Wide Collaborative for our Library!

Way back in May, my students worked together during field day to create some artwork that was requested by our amazing librarian. Well, I'm excited to share that last week, their work was hung and the library looks incredibly colorful because of it! Check out this tour:

My excited face and vein popping neck say it all, folks. 

School wide collabs (a project that all of your students work on that remains in the school as a permanent display) can be a big task. Especially when you only see your students once a week. That's why I love to do my school wide collaboratives on a day when I see all of my students at once: FIELD DAY! In the past, I was supposed to do sidewalk chalk for a day as apart of field day. You all...I did that one time in the 90 degree humidity that is Tennessee spring and I decided never again. And that's how our Field Day collaboratives was born. You can read more about it in detail here. Or you can hear more about it here:

I have about 350 students in my school. I had to have a lot of options available for them on field day so they would each be able to take part. I loved how each piece ended up turning out. 

We painted on 8" X 11" canvas board for the numbers and letters. However, matteboard would have worked as well. In a pinch, cardboard might even do the trick if it were primed with gesso first. 

 If these look familiar to you, that's because we did our first large painting like this the year before. It was such a hit it inspired several more. You can read about our first attempt here. 

 The set up for the day was pretty easy. We simply used up the paint we'd had at the end of the year. My chairs were gone because we'd just had our art show . All I had to do was move some tables around, make some signs and prep. Okay. Not gonna lie...the prep did take a while...

 Like making these big banners to be used at the start of the school year...

And these giant canvases...

 But, you know what, totally worth it. 

I think the letters make me the most happy. I drew the letters in pencil on canvas board. The kids could either paint the letters in all cool or all warm colors and then use the opposite for the background. 

 I thought they looked amazing...and then we framed them. Fabulous!

We've done so many school wide collaboratives now that I think I'm long overdue for a recap post! I love doing them because it's like we are leaving behind our own little fingerprint on our school. Just thought I'd share!

In the Art Room: Tiny Gallery of Gratitude

Recently, I shared that my students in fourth grade are working on creating their own Tiny Art Show. Because I was going to be out of school for a couple of days visiting the art teachers in Vermont, I needed a lesson to keep my students engaged. I created this Tiny Gallery of Gratitude sheet for my third and fourth grade students. I hope they enjoyed it (I'll find out tomorrow!) but fingers crossed they did. If you think your student would like it too, here's a link to the FREE PDF. 

I gathered these books for my sub to start the lesson with. They are all wonderful books to introduce the idea of gratitude. Because my sub would be with my students for a couple of days, I asked that she read a book at the start of each class...but I let her decide which ones to read. 

 Here is the sheet I created for my kindergarten through second grade students. (link works, just click on bold sentence!)

As for supplies, I set out pencils, erasers and color pencils for my students to use. I asked that the sub save the work so that we could return to this drawing as a sketch for early finishers. I also want to see what they drew!

If you are interested in other projects that show gratitude, here you go:

 This Gallery of Gratitude lesson was a HUGE hit with the entire school with all creative hands on deck. I cannot recommend doing this lesson enough!

 I recently did an updated version of the Gallery of Gratitude and I love it even more! We used modeling clay and did a bit of writing out the faculty and/or staff member we were grateful for. Lesson here and here. 

Helping my students understand what gratitude is and how to show it is very important to me. Do you have lessons that you love that help spread gratitude? I'd love to hear about them!

In the Art Room: The Gallery Game!

UPDATE! Here is the Painting Genres PDF.

AND here's the Tiny Art Museum PDF. 

Lately, I've been inspired by two amazing art teachers: McKay Lanker Bayer who is the art teacher behind Tiny Art Show (see more on her Instagram @tinyartshow) and Emily Compton who is an elementary art teacher who recently shared how she uses games for assessment. I was struck by McKay's Tiny Art show concept and have been wanting to do this with my students. What I love about McKay's art show is that it's not just little works of art but it's also about how to curate an art showing. And I totally fell in love with Emily's super simple assessment ideas. 

I have many weaknesses as a teacher but one of the two that I want to work on this school year are assessment, teamwork (for the kids, I gave up on being a team player myself) and including more art in lessons. This Gallery Game I came up with seemed to do all of those things. Plus the works of art are so tiny that it ties in perfectly to the Tiny Art Show we'll soon be creating!

Hopefully this video will help you out!

To create the game, I used this artist sticker book from Dover Publications. I added the stickers to magnets and scored the cookie sheets at The Dollar Tree. I created two games per table so that kids could pair up and work together. They were to sort the artwork according to THIS Painting Genre sheet. They were to then create a museum, curated anyway they liked. Most choose to categorize the work by genre but others did by artist or color. 

From there, they drew on their cookie sheet, using both sides of the sheet if necessary. Inside a sheet protector, they could name their museum, the sections and draw a map! It was a lot of work for them in 30 minutes but they had a blast AND they learned so much!

DIY: Spoonflower Student Artwork Dress!

I've had it on my mind to print my students artwork on fabric for a very long time. I've done just about every variation of kid-created fabric for dress-makin' such as having them color IKEA coloring sheet fabric which I then stitched into a dress (more details on that dress here): 

Or the time I found the fabric of picture frames! I had my students draw their self portraits on the fabric before creating that into a dress. Both of these dresses were created with Graffiti fabric markers. They've seen plenty of washing and, while the colors have faded a bit, they still look pretty vibrant. And the kids absolutely love them. More details on that dress here. 

But the idea of creating fabric from student work is one that I've been toying with every since hearing about Spoonflower. In the past, I've ordered fabric from Spoonflower and made a couple of dresses with designs created by artists. 

You can check out the details of this dress and fabric here. 

And details of this dress can be found here. Having ordered fabric from Spoonflower before, I knew I liked it. The fabric I ordered has a good thick quality which is great for the kind of full dresses that I like to create. So, this past spring, just before I hung some artwork up for our art show, I laid a bunch of it out on the floor and took a couple of snaps with my camera. After the art show, I uploaded the photos to the Spoonflower website and was shocked how stinkin' easy it was to rearrange the works of art to create the desired pattern. 

 In case the artwork on this dress looks a little familiar to you, it's from one of the more popular lessons on my blog: The Chris Uphues Lesson for All! Here's a peak of just a few of the works of art based on that lesson:

Take a look at the work of art above and then the print quality below. Pretty amazing, right?!

 This weekend I decided to cut into this Chris-Uphues inspired, kid-created fabric and create a dress using one of my favorite vintage patterns. Now, I did use a circle skirt pattern for the bottom...so only the bodice was used for this dress. 

Here's a little peak at some of the other fabrics I had made with Spoonflower. I cannot wait to make them into dresses too. 

 Usually I'm all about the big belt but when I tried my big belt on with this dress, it seemed to take away from the print. So I went with a hot pink ribbon for the belt instead. 

 Not wanting to waste even a scrap of this precious fabric, I decided to create a couple bow to be featured at the base of the shoulder straps. 

I'm so excited to wear this dress to school and share it with my students. Big thanks to Spoonflower for working with me on this fabric-making adventure and to Chris Uphues for his constant inspiration.