Colleen Thornbrugh

I recently started teaching the Artastic class at the Boys and Girls Club. I really really like it, and I thought I'd share some of the stuff we've been doing there with you.

Last week we talked about warm and cool colors. The first project we did was a self portrait called "Wild Side/Calm Side." The idea was to draw themselves split in half, making one side of themselves really crazy and the other side relatively calm. Then they had to color their wild sides in warm colors and their calm sides in cool colors. Most of the kids took their drawings home, but I put a few up on the wall...

The one below is mine. It's too bad I don't have a photo of Cevin's Wild Side/Calm Side. He is really proud of it. He's been enjoying doing the projects with me when I prepare for class.

After Wild Side/Calm Side we did a project called Warm Hands. I got these templates online of concentric circles and diamonds and had the kids trace their hands on them. Then they had to paint the inside of their hands with warm colors and the outsides with complementary cool colors. This was a good one because we reinforced warms and cools and talked about complementary colors and practiced with water colors. I think they turned out pretty nice...

Today we did collages. I had the kids choose a color and then find images in magazines that were all shades and tints of that color. Here's some of the kids working...

Here are mine and Cevin's collages. Cevin chose blue and I chose red. I thought this was a fun project and I think the kids enjoyed it too. On Wednesday I think we are going to do mosaics.

So that's it so far! I got the ideas for these projects from ArtProjectsForKids.org and I am planning on doing a few more from that site too. It's really cool. Also I will be posting the Artastic projects here weekly hopefully so stay tuned!