I was very impressed when I went to the Opening Night earlier this evening.  All of the chosen art pieces – from the various participating schools – were wonderful!  The Burnaby Art Gallery, as usual, has done a great job of displaying the artwork.

I met up with Colton, Mykaela, and their mom who were also enjoying the displays.  As part of the formal speeches for the ‘opening’ all of the children who had artwork in the display were invited to the front to receive a warm round of applause – and to get their photos taken.

I was happy to see (and hear) so many people making nice comments about all the Rosser art pieces.  I met up with some teacher-friends of mine and they were very complimentary towards our students’ work.

Everyone who created art for this exhibition should be very proud of themselves.

I am sure you all saw these wonderful self portraits last night at the Student-Led conferences.  They form a very appealing wall of creativity in our classroom.

Through a directed drawing lesson students learned the proper positioning of facial features.  It is a common tendency for young children to place the eyes way too high on the face.  In actual fact they are centred in the middle of the face – from top to bottom.  Eyes are not seen as round objects but are more almond-shaped.  For proper positioning and sizing 5 eyes would fit from end to end across the face – of course, we only have the two!!  The eyes should be in positions 2 and 4 (if we measured out 5 eye spaces).  The tops of the ears are at the same height as the eyes and the bottoms of the ears line up with the mouth.

To become more accurate at the proportions in their drawing takes a great deal of time and practise.  We will be working more on these drawing lessons in the next few weeks.

Students have been learning about Vincent Van Gogh.  We read about his life and have been exploring some of his more famous paintings.  With his ‘A Starry Night’ we created our own versions using oil pastels as a basis and finishing it off with a watered down blue tempra wash.

Students learned an important lesson that they need to ensure that they use a solid base of the oil pastels – especially with the light colours (white and yellow) – before doing the wash.  While the white is not seen on the white paper beforehand, it is extremely important that it is present to repel the paint and become visible afterwards.

When we saw the dried results we needed to go back and add in these vital details with more oil pastels.  I think the results are quite striking.