Painting Place Mats

All right today was painting class, with Nonie. She brought these lovely cloth place mats for us to paint on. They already had a design on them with leaves, so I chose to paint blueberries, red berries that are supposed to be apples, and some flower varieties at the end of each leaf section. Then I painted some colored vines and small leaves. These were incredibly difficult as far as painting the flowers. The roses don't really look like roses to me. My mom did not actually paint today, rather spent her time helping both Caitlin and DJ with their strokes and blending. This worked well for them. Mine is the only one shown, because I am the only one that actually completed mine. Both kids will work on theirs the next class. They will be doing them for a while, I am guessing, lol. Especially since Caitlin has decided that she is going to paint all the swirls on hers, before she actually paints any flowers or anything else.

I know I am going backwards but lesson plans for Tuesday 02/14/12 were:

DJ:
Language Arts: Hyphens
Health: Growth and Development
Reading: Literature unit for Call of the Wild
Math: Saxon 65 chapter 70 plus Learning Horizons
Social Studies: Middle Ages: Chapter 22
Reading Comprehension
Spanish
Map Skills

Caitlin:
Science: Wetlands
Language Arts: Clothes as Words, verbs
Health: Teeth
Math: Subtraction, problem solving, and time
Social Studies: Plymouth Colony
Spelling
Head of the Class: Three Cycles

Plus before painting class today, DJ read three chapters of Treasure Island, and Caitlin did Head of the Class one cycle.

Painting Class

I used to blog every single day. Now I am lucky if I get in every other day, lol! Wednesday was painting class. My mom brought these cute little canvas bags for us to paint on. First of all painting on canvas is harder than glass, and you need a lot more paint. I like mine until I added the leaves to my flowers, and then that was that. My moms is lovely as always, and I am going to list hers in my Etsy store to see how people take to them. DJ did a car on his, and Caitlin made a rainbow. DJ is a fast painter. He gets his idea, paints it and then is gone. The rest of us sit there thinking, lol. Caitlin also painted the seagull and orange ocean to the left. I did the other practice ones on paper. Since this is a homeschool blog, I won't blather on about my art and how I am progressing. Since I am a tad obsessed with it, I will be sharing my progress on my Jewelry and Gems blog. I really want to paint on jewelry, that is my ultimate goal. Anyhoo what has everyone been up to this week? How is the weather? It is still fabulous here in FL, even though this is supposed to be our coldest month. We will continue with painting class until forever I guess. At least that is how it looks right now. We are starting a sort of education co op with one other homeschool family. I will let you know how that goes once we actually begin. Have a great weekend!

Painting Class #3: Turkeys

OK, first off let me explain what you are looking at. I thought we were painting turkeys on glass bottles today. I got my cable communications mixed up with my mom, the teacher, and we were going to draw and then pain the turkeys on paper so we got an idea of how it would look and if it is what we wanted. So that is what we did. Since we are concentrating on learning to blend in one stroke, I saved one of the blending plates to share. I would have taken pictures of them all, but the kids already threw them away. The yellow and purple feathered turkey is mine. I figured since this was a sort of experiment kind of turkey that I would practice strokes taught on the video. It was going great until I got to the face where I practice her fancy leaves and his face looks like a giant pansy, LOL! He also has eyebrows and a vine type mouth. Oh well at least I got the strokes better. DJ is doing well, and I am going to have him start practicing the strokes with a dry brush in the instruction book. That way he can follow the strokes without making a mess, and get a feel for how the stroke should go. That has helped me a lot too. Caitlin is still working on blending and has not moved to strokes yet. But she is having a ball painting and I don't think she much cares about the rules of it all. If you are not familiar with the Donna Dewberry method, you are supposed to be able to load a paintbrush and blend your colors all in one stroke of the brush. If you look at the turkey feathers that are yellow and purple, each feather is one stroke of the paint brush, so you can visualize what I mean.