Art Class Schedules

Is your toddler/preschooler obsessed with one color? For clothes, rain boots, cups, art… everything! We get it… and so did Yves Klein, a French painter so obsessed with a brilliant hue of blue, he “invented” Ives Klein Blue and painted monochromatic painting with it. We will use one favorite color and experiment with mixing to change it slightly.

Children will explore the intuitive artistic skills of balance, pattern, and learn our shapes. We will even introduce the important concept of negative shapes as we look at the colorful art of Oliver Lee Jackson.

Let’s enjoy the winter-themed pop-up books of Robert Sabuda. His artwork is part literature, part sculptural art, and part paper construction site! We will create our own simplified version of a three-dimensional paper sculpture to make any space special.

Marcel Duchamp based a lot of his artwork off the “Happy Accident.” Luckily for us artists, one can get a beautiful result based solely on chance! Create a mini-canvas or a keepsake ornament with fluid acrylics.

Let’s travel to the Harbin, China Ice Festival: open to viewers in December-see impressive ice sculptures that visitors walk through. We get so excited in Fredericksburg just thinking about snow, so let’s make a snow sculpture ourselves to get in the mood for winter weather!

Archeologists and Art Historians made an amazing discovery in Xi’an China about 50 years ago: a 2,000 year old army of Terracotta Warriors buried in the ground. Children will learn about the work of archeologists by “digging” for artifacts, then make a time capsule of their own to mark the last art class of 2022!

Drawing skills using four repeated images: chalk pastels help us practice shading, blending, and using color for shading and highlights. Snowmen, in the stylings of Andy Warhol.

Walk into class and see our wacky, colorful, and unexpected still life. Students will create a simplified pencil sketch, working hard to capture the proportions and shapes of many different objects. We will be inspired by the still lives from the past and present. Janet Fish…we are looking at you!

It’s time for color, and we’ve earned it, after the careful drawing work from last week. Students will learn to add light washes of watercolor paint, and slowly add drama and dimension to their composition with value. Local watercolor expert, Laura Craig, will be an inspiration.

This week will be a fun escape from the rigorous drawing lessons from the previous weeks. Marcel Duchamp loved to create with “Happy Accidents.” We will use fluid acrylics to create a keepsake ornament or mini-canvas.

Let’s travel to the Southwest of the United States. Bev Doolittle is a rising star in American Art, and she began her career at traveling art festivals! (Just try to get a print of her “Sacred Ground” painting!). Students will create an outdoor study in the style of how she began her career: loose wash contrasting with precise ink.

Part 2 of our Bev Doolittle project. Depending on the development of our watercolor and ink painting, we will finish last week’s project, or we will create an acrylic painting of birch trees.

Drawing skills and repeated images: chalk pastels help us practice shading, blending, and using color for shading and highlights. Andy Warhol loved to give the impression of mass production, like a factory. What image do you think would make an interesting composition when repeated?

Walk into class and see our wacky, colorful, and unexpected still life. Students will create a simplified pencil sketch, working hard to capture the proportions and shapes of many different objects. We will be inspired by the still lives from the past and present. Janet Fish…we are looking at you!

 It’s time for color, and we’ve earned it, after the careful drawing work from last week. Students will learn to add light washes of watercolor paint, and slowly add drama and dimension to their composition with value. Local watercolor expert, Laura Craig, will be an inspiration.

This week will be a fun escape from the rigorous drawing lessons from the previous weeks. Marcel Duchamp loved to create with “Happy Accidents.” We will use fluid acrylics to create a keepsake ornament or mini-canvas.

Let’s travel to the Southwest of the United States. Bev Doolittle is a rising star in American Art, and she began her career at traveling art festivals! Students will create an outdoor study in the style of how she began her career: loose wash contrasting with precise ink. She and her husband would sometimes collaborate, one did the loose wash, the other did the precise ink… what kind of collaborations can we produce?

Part 2 of our Bev Doolittle project. Depending on the development of our watercolor and ink painting, we will finish last week’s project, or we will create an acrylic painting of birch trees.