Ted Harrison Multicolor Landscapes
The artist we based this week's project on is Ted Harrison. He was a Canadian artist that based many of his works on where he lived on the Yukon in Canada. He attended Art College in Hartlepool and got his teaching certificate. He was a teacher for 28 years and also made two books. By making these colorful landscapes, we were able to talk about oil resist, watercolor techniques, and foreground, middleground, and background. We started off class by demonstrating to the students what happens when you put watercolor paint on top of oil pastels. The kids were amazing at how the oil pastels repelled the watercolors!
We then moved onto how to do our project. We started by sketching our landscapes and tracing those lines with different colored oil pastels. Next, we used both the wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry techniques of applying watercolors onto the blank spaces of our paper. After we set them to the side to dry, we took our black construction paper to trace and cut out the objects we wanted to put in the foreground and middleground of our pieces.
Classroom management went well this week. We took the notes from Grace last week and carried them into this lesson. The supplies were all laid out on a separate table so after the first half of the project, the kids could take back supplies they didn’t need and get the ones for the second half. It helped reduce clutter in the children’s workplace. We questioned the students at the beginning of the class and throughout. One objective we wanted the kids to achieve was to know the difference between the wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry techniques.
By first teaching them the technique and then asking them which they were using throughout the class, I think they were able to learn and remember the difference. Another objective we had was for the kids to understand that oil pastels are resistant to water. Like with the painting techniques, I think that the kids were able to achieve this. Previously I mentioned that this project had two parts, although we decided to teach it all at once so that the students could go at their own pace and ask for help if they didn’t remember the next steps. For the students that went through this lesson faster, we talked with them about what more they could add or even at times asked them to help add on to what we had done if they didn’t want to add more to their own work.
I thought our classroom management has improved a lot since we first started PAINT Saturdays. Although this is true, I do think we still can improve on directing the kids attention back to the project/clean up towards the end of class. Personally, I feel much more confident as a teacher now that I have been able to work on my classroom management skills instead of just talking about it in a class. I have had so much fun learning more about the students in our class, being able to help them be creative and teaching them new skills. The past couple of weeks have also taught me about leading and guiding a classroom not just being there to watch over the students.
