Painting Class Take 2...and 3

 By Sara:

After the success of the first painting class, I planned two more classes to meet the interest of more potential students.  These had to take place during the long school holiday: December and January.  I had one class at my home a couple weeks before Christmas and another class at my friend Jane's home after New Year's.

Another friend gave me an excellent suggestion to watch videos on YouTube about teaching art and I got all kinds of cool ideas for these classes.  Maybe it was because I had more young students, but these ones finished their paintings much more quickly than the first group of kids.  So it was good to have other activities for them to do to become better at art in general.

Everyone painted a "color wheel" in their notebook to show the primary colors and what secondary colors you get when you mix together, for example, blue and yellow.

Since some of the students finished their paintings super quickly, I found some big pieces of cardboard for them to draw and paint on, which was so fun that some of the other kids got distracted from finishing their own paintings to go draw something on the cardboard boxes!

 

 

I'm also very thankful for the people who helped me with these classes.  I would not have been able to handle all the kids on my own!  I had more of my Bible study youth as helpers and also some friends - Jilanne and Evan - who came from Kampala to spend Christmas with us. 

One fun new activity I discovered was making "scratch paper" where they colored all over a piece of paper with crayon, then painted over it with black paint.  The next day, they could use a toothpick to scratch a design onto the page so it had a black background and colorful lines.

It was fun to see which different pictures the children chose to paint.  There were some designs which were repeated in two or three of the classes like the butterfly, gibbon, frog, kingfisher, and flamingos.  But other designs were only done once: the cartoon lion, chameleon, hawk, and scene from space.  (The pictures below are of paintings still in progress)

All in all, it was a great activity for the kids to experience and something fun they could do during their holiday, which they aren't doing much (or at all) in school.  They tired me out though, so I am glad for a break from painting classes for a while!

Painting Class

By Sara:

I had a great time over a couple weeks in August-September offering a painting class for kids during their school holiday.  I advertised it for kids ages 10-14, but I ended up with one boy who was 7 - he kept up well with the other kids, but got tired out and distracted before the end of class!

I had 12 students in the class and two of my older Bible study youth volunteered to be my assistants and help me manage and teach the class.  We started out with a fun activity where I gave them a tiny piece of a picture to enlarge on a bigger square of paper.  After everyone was done, we put them together to see how well we did on the enlargement.  It was a way to practice dividing a design up into a grid and then transferring it onto a bigger, proportional grid.

I printed out a bunch of pictures for them to choose from, everyone drew a grid of squares over it, then put a grid on a board.  Then, they worked on transferring the small design onto the big board.

I taught them how to mix primary colors of paint (red, blue, yellow) to make secondary colors (green, purple, orange) as well as brown and different shades.  I only bought red, blue, yellow, black, and white so they had to learn how to make the other colors they wanted.

The kids weren't completely done with their paintings at this point, but the video below can give you a pretty good idea of what they accomplished.  There was definitely some natural artistic talent there already in most of these kids!