Apple trees and apple picking, student art display, children's drawing class, 9/25/18

We grew a little apple orchard in art class. It was a tricky experiment to figure out just how to do these. At one point a child claimed to prefer drawing much more than 'craft'. All aspects are necessary though. Figuring out the engineering for making such structures happen is an important skill to develop. Also, to learn to deal with frustration until one makes a breakthrough of solving the problem. There are many ways to make paper model trees. We only tried one way. We ended up having to create different solutions to getting one tree to stay upright because it was made of thin paper instead of card stock.

These trees work like the slotted house of cards. We cut two identical tree shapes from card stock. Find the vertical midpoint on each. Cut a straight line up the middle to that point on one tree. Cut straight down through the midline to the midpoint on the other tree. Slot them together. You might be lucky and have them stand on their own. We made stabilizer stands for them.

Those plans were not well worked out in my head. Make an interlocking low box/frame/fence using 4 strips of card stock and the same slit/cut method. The tree trunk will join with the fence in this same manner but across the middles of each strip. This is where all measuring gets tricky and I don't have diagrams to show you. Until I do, you might have to think of this as a puzzle to solve! Solutions and diagrams etc welcome,

Haying the old fashioned way - children's art class, 9/11/18

Drawings by adult and kids. Gathering the hay into sheaves, tractors, wagon, barns, hay rolls and bales.

St. George Grange at Wiley's Corner. Adult drawing class display, 9/24/18

Class drew from digitally outlined and gridded reproductions of my reference photo as well as the actual photo. Some people find the grid helps see the actual angles a line is at. I tend to get too mixed up trying to concentrate in that environment and just get frustrated. Draw a grid of squares freehand. Using a ruler is pointless if you are not going to make lines perpendicular. Practice getting your lines perpendicular even if they are wobbly.

A student brought in an acrylic painting as a present. It is a sunset with clouds, water, grass, and 'stems', (or trunks-?). These 'stems' look to me like five crows watching the sunset.

Barns practice in perspective, Harjula's barn, St. George Peninsula Maine, adult art class student display, 9/17/18

Little Green Schoolhouse, building on Rte 131 St. George Peninsula, adult art class, 9/10/18

My photo converted to b/w then converted to a grid overlay. Students worked from the bw gridded pic.
First practice was to just look at the dark area and color that in without outlines. We did that twice.

Then we roughed in a freehand grid and mapped out the school house. For color reference they were on their own since I had not brought in any color pics.

I see now, but barely, that this roof is NOT in a pyramid shape as I had told class. It is a hip roof though.

St. George buildings ref pics - school, grange, Harjula's barn

Making crepes - just egg, flour, water and butter...video

I made a video last year of my making crepes, (just the crepes). But I don't know how to get  it to my YouTube. It's long, (26 minutes), and maybe not good 'public stuff'. This is the link in my gdrive:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B85nYdaq-B81MVdVNXRzaUttNjQ

Cat & Dog music combos, 9/5/18. French horn, double base, concertina, cymbals. Freehand black crayon line drawings.

For coloring pages!