Alice DuBois

i stumbled onto this lovely artist on flickr and fell in love with her fun style, i thought she would be great inspiration for my camp fire kids. i had the first of two meetings last night with my older girls (first meeting of the year) and they were very attentive and seemed to enjoy the relaxed pace of drawing and painting rather than a more serious lesson plan. these 5th and 6th graders can be hard to keep happy these days...

we spent some time looking over pictures of alice's work and talking about her use of color and design. i wanted to keep the girls focused on birds and backgrounds and gave them limitations on what they could do. i have learned from the past (especially with my own girls) that often they will get off task and if the result isn't of their liking they can get frustrated. even with lots of instruction and guidance, there was one unexpected glitch (i'll get to it later) but overall i think this was a successful art lesson
sketching out birds first
blocking in color
completed picture
so the "glitch" i found was that as the end of the meeting approached and maybe a little too much gossiping and laughing was going on, i reminded the girls to keep on task and rushed them a bit
i realized that every kid who had some open white space started slapping dots all over to "finish up"
and in the end all but a few had polka dot backgrounds. the reason i mention it is that even with careful instruction and guidance to focus on a specific style, they will always be kids and do their own goofy thing. i spoke with emily about it and she got upset that i was saying something negative about her picture. i tried to explain to her that this was a lesson and i am like a teacher and if you don't follow the teacher's instructions you might get a "C" or "B" rather than an "A" on that assignment. of course i love all the work everyone did and everyone enjoyed themselves, i am just always surprised at the lessons i learn about how hard it is to be a leader and a teacher since no matter what i do, there is always a glitch. ha ha!!
a few finished pictures, thanks Alice DuBois!! i will try this tomorrow with my 2nd graders... we'll see how it goes!!