January Art a la Carte

This is a blog post that I should have written and published last month, but I didn't get a picture of Eric and his art work because there wasn't enough time. I took the artwork pictures just this last week, so now I can share them in this blog post. Meanwhile, I hope I haven't forgotten too much of the details.

This first picture is of a chalk pastel that Eric did last month. His class won an extra art class because of their good behavior. I didn't know about this extra art class until the day of the regularly scheduled January class. I saw this hanging in the area that Eric's class artwork is usually hung and I wondered whose stuff that was. Eric's name is so subtle on this artwork that I didn't see it until I found out that this was from the extra class. I thought he did a pretty decent job with his owl.

I brought the usual lunch for Eric--Wendy's spicy chicken nuggets and vanilla Frosty. For some reason, we started talking about being able to raise one eyebrow. I can raise one eyebrow when I want to. Patrick cannot. When he sees me doing it, he usually starts laughing and then sometimes he will put his hand up to one eyebrow to keep it from moving so he can try to raise one eyebrow back at me.

This picture is Eric's attempt to raise one eyebrow only. He actually did raise one eyebrow at one point, but only when he wasn't thinking about it so hard. I couldn't get a picture when he did that, but I thought this picture was adorable. He looks a little quirky, but still endearing.

The lesson for the January Art a la Carte class was about using repetition in art in the style of Gustav Klimt. The inspiration piece was based on his painting, The Kiss. This required a lot of extra help, and so they had asked for five volunteers, one for each table. I convinced Patrick to come help also. He didn't come for lunch, but he arrived when Eric was finishing up his lunch.

The reason why they needed so many volunteers was that there were a lot of steps involved. First, the kids had to paint the background brown. There was one little boy especially who kept trying to get into the paint prematurely. One of the teachers stayed to watch him and him only, and then the co-teacher came to relieve her halfway through class.

There was also a lot of cutting. They cut the "blanket" out of yellow paper and also the "grass" out of green paper. They did some drawing with markers--the flowers on the grass, and the different circles and spirals you can see in Eric's artwork. The white and black pieces of paper were pre-cut before class. I helped cut some of those during a prep class on a different day.

By that time they were starting to rush because class was almost over. The kids were supposed to draw themselves and something or someone else they loved. One of the kids mentioned a Minion from Despicable Me 2. Eric loves Minions. He was trying to draw one and was particularly frustrated because it didn't look like he wanted to.

Now, some of the other volunteers were being almost too helpful to some of the kids. One of them was basically gluing and drawing stuff on her daughter's artwork. I guess she felt like her daughter should have glued more white and black pieces on or drawn more flowers/spirals. I really believe that the artwork has to be the child's artwork. They aren't being graded on this anyway. They just need to have fun with it.

Even though my OCD tendencies always make me want to reach in there and help Eric all the time, I don't--unless he asks me to. He has so much fun doing this stuff and in the end it usually looks pretty decent and I can say that he did it all by himself. The exception was when I drew a Minion head for him. He started looking a lot less frustrated at that point and started drawing the Minion body and arms. He also drew the side view of himself as instructed by his art teacher. Yes, this art is definitely Eric.