Modern Baby's Room

My wife and I are expecting our second baby in May, so I spent last week prepping the nursery during my spring break. As much as we loved the cold grays and blacks of the nursery from our first kid, we felt like we needed to do a little something to make it unique for baby number two. With our first, we were still getting used to the idea that cocktails would now mean Sprite and Grenadine so the directions were, "nothing childish" when I painted the nursery.

This time around I wanted to make things a little more colorful. I do like the neutral mural I made for our son, and honestly, I wasn't ready to give that up but I wanted to add a pop of color. The challenge was finding a way to add color while still fitting in with the rest of the design. I figured a colorful accent wall would be the way to go. I decided to keep with the hard-edged, geometric style but add color and soften it a bit by making the shapes almost as abstracted roses with geometric shapes forming spirals. It will be interesting to see if baby number 2 ends up with incredible visual spatial reasoning, or if she is totally disoriented. Either way, I figure there's nothing babies love more than post-painterly abstraction, right?

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Weaving with Monotypes

I have been doing a lot of clay and other messy projects lately, so I thought what better than printmaking to get my tables clean at the end of the day. I started by teaching my first graders a little bit about suminagashi, the Japanese paper marbling technique. Suminagashi translates to floating ink and it can create wonderful, vibrant marbled papers. While this was a great inspiration for our process, it wasn't a technique I believed the average first grade student could master. I also took inspiration from Helen Frankenthaler's "soak and stain" method of abstract expressionism. For this project, students started by making monotypes. I sprayed all the tables, and students painted in the puddles, then they pressed their papers to the paint. Essentially they were using the tables like giant stamps. The result was wonderful prints that seemed somewhat marbled, and somewhat like color field paintings. Each student made three prints this past week. One print was made up ...

Painted and Printed Pumpkins

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Do I Really Wanna Know

As my school year winds down, I try to take a little time to reflect on my year. I try to do this while things are still fresh. Things are so fresh in fact, I still have another week and a half left in school. While this time of year is crazy and so many kids are checked out, i thought it might be nice to get feedback from students on all of the changes i have made this year. Of course when I think of all the work I've put into those changes, the natural question becomes "do I really want to know students opinions?" The natural answer all of us are taught to say is yes, of course we want feedback from all stakeholders and students should have a say in their education. Of course that sounds good in theory, but in practice, it can be much harder. Realistically, it is hard not to take it personally when a kid says they don't like the system you set up. I wouldn't want to gather data as a show of valuing student opinions while they feel pressure to compliment me, so ...

Wood Art Ed

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