Art

Trying Something New

 

The last art class I took was probably in high school. I don’t remember liking it much; in fact, I don’t remember much about it at all. I do still have the mouse I copied/enlarged with a grid technique (put a 1 inch grid over an existing work and render it square by square on a larger grid), but if there was more than that in a one semester class, I don’t recall. What I remember is going into class convinced I was no good at art and leaving class confirmed in that belief. Art was something you either had …

community

Reclaiming Car Space

When the designers sat down to reshape our neighborhood so many years ago, I think they must have forgotten certain details of human nature. Turns out that if you build a oval park and completely surround it with roads, sooner or later drivers will think it looks a lot like a race track and drive accordingly. This is especially problematic when there’s a park in the middle, with a porous border leaking kids chasing runaway balls. Somehow we got lucky. Not only has no one been hit near our Central Park (although there have been close calls), but there are …

community, current events

Where do we go now?

It seems quiet here today. Caitlyn’s FIRST Lego League team had a field trip to Highline’s Marine Science and Technology Center, and even the kids seemed subdued, somewhat surprising for a handful of geeky 12 year olds. We parents carried on, shellshocked, exhausted, grieving. I expect there will be many, many conversations to come, but everything I could think of to say to people today sounds like empty platitudes in my head, so there were many moments of just looking at each other. “Yeah…” one of us says. “Yeah,” the other one responds. Shock. Anger. Denial. Depression. Bargaining/Compromise. Adaptation. This …

Art

Playing with Other People’s Toys

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Recently, Caitlyn got a weekend with her grandparents and met her grandmother’s Saori loom. Sharing the results of her explorations was the very first thing she wanted to do when we arrived on Sunday evening to collect her. Then, because she was *that* excited, she insisted that I meet the loom as well. I may have spent the rest of the evening weaving. I had a small lap loom when I was a kid, and I remember generally liking weaving with it. I didn’t really pursue it beyond that, never really figuring out what to do besides repetitive stripes or …

Art, Caitlyn, homeschooling

Kids Art Week Wrapup

 

It took us more than the prescribed week, but Caitlyn and I did finish Carla Sonheim’s Kids Art Week video lesson series. Here’s a sampling of my favorites of our results: I painted this cross-eyed owl in the style of Jean Dubuffet. The process used salt as a resist with the watercolor, something I’d read about yet never tried (not really surprising since the amount of watercolor I do is pretty much zero). I really like the resulting texture! The black is an acrylic over the watercolor, something I doubt I would have thought to do on my own (mixing …