Happy New Year!

Christmas tree drawings, papercuts, and cards, kids and adults, children's drawing class, 12/13/16.

Christmas tree drawings, papercuts, and cards - kids' drawing class, student art, children and adults.

A four year old learning to hold and master scissors so it actually cuts and drawing triangles, (can you remember trying to form the peak of an A as a very young child - almost impossible at that age), worked so hard and came away filled with glee.

An eight year old avid artist turned the family's triangle trees into a larger tree farm by gluing them onto a two page spread.

A ten year old lover of drawing figured out most of the confusing aspects of turning a symmetrical tree papercut into a folding card and then got to work teaching the adult!

They also all managed to turn their so called 'mistakes' into something else. There was not enough room or time to put up all the art they all made. And they had made it all practically in silence from almost silent demonstration and gestures. Then bang, bang, bang - up on the wall for the group art display.

 

A Dove of Peace ...for the season.

With wishes that you may all make yourselves a peaceful day! Testing Etsy mini with twelve listings.

Cat to color or decorate like a kabuki or yakusa cat. Horizontal format now...

Repost to turn the image format to horizontal. Printed out nice on full page for me at least. Digital drawing in a tablet app. I do it but hate drawing on a tablet with the gushy fat tipped 'pen'. Always forget the name - stylus- of these things.... Seems smaller this way?

Christmas angels, animals, poems, coloring book pdf

Christmas angels, cats, dogs, animals, scenes and poems, from my cards, collected in a 13 page pdf to download, print out and color. In both my Christmas shop and here in my Etsy shop.
Christmas coloring book by Catinka Knoth

and in Catinka's Christmas Shop: Christmas coloring book pdf

Paper house tracer/template sketch

I sketched this out before the gingerbread house drawing class. It is not done with rulers. I made measurements by pinching the paper. You get the idea and can see what you might like to change. Decorate as you want before you cut it out. It probably works better on card stock, but it is small enough to work with copy paper. I put slits along the tabs in this first cut-out. This light weight paper does not work well with the slit join. Card stock would probably work well with a slit join. Otherwise just glue or tape those tabs together, on the inside would be nice. The roof needs to be fastened down from inside with tape, or glue a strip of paper across the join on the inside. If you want an overhang, fold a little edge on each side. There may not be enough excess for an overhang. This is by no means an exact plan, but it is good enough to make something with

Holiday cards calligraphy style, gingerbread house drawings, student drawings, adult and kids' art classes, 12/5&6/16

In adult class we did some calligraphy/script style marks practice before using these marks to make Christmas trees, wreathes, and other motifs. We used two colored pencils taped together to create an interesting double line.
Kids class we made a variety of marks in the border area of our papers. Students followed along with me. They tried to guess what the marks might 'be', but I managed to keep mum. It is fun to hear the kids try to guess why something is going on. It is also interesting to simply let them keep wondering and THINKING and watch how well they work things out for themselves.
We raced through at the end in tracing from a pattern that they at least got to color as a gingerbread house. They would have to wait til they got home to cut it out and put this together as a little paper house model or object, (rather than just a flat drawing). You see the beginnings of one in the display.
The pattern should have two longer oblong panels and two ends panels that include the roof peaks. My pattern has the wall panels all in one row. One could add the opposite wall to the roof section instead. The roof is formed by the two oblong panes jutting out between the peak ends. The pattern includes tabs for gluing. I say this because the cut out model on display here may be missing one of the long walls/panels.
I will try to add some version of the pattern here for people to make their own paper gingerbread house models.
The rough paper house pattern is now on the next post up:
Small paper house pattern

Native American Heritage Month - patchwork designs, kids class, 11/29/16

Folded paper squares let us create lots of 'patchwork' style designs. We scribbled up some rough pencil graphs first just to play with grid/cell drawing. The little four year old played along fairly willingly! It seems this also looks a bit like Minecraft, a game I knew little about. Now I know a little bit about it. 'Mine' is not a possessive, it refers to 'mining'.

This display shows both kids and adult.

Native American Heritage Month - patchwork designs, kids class, 11/29/16