I haven't posted about Eric's monthly art class in a while. Our "tradition" starts with lunch together. Eric always wants eight spicy chicken nuggets and a small vanilla Frosty from Wendy's. I usually eat at home before or after I have lunch with him. Today, I decided to "splurge" and get Chick-Fil-A nuggets for myself along with a small Cookies and Cream milkshake. That's why I decided to take a picture, to show the two similar packages. Yum--I'd forgotten how good Cookies and Cream is and how good the milkshakes are at Chick-Fil-A.
Today's art lesson talked about the paintings of Thomas Kinkade, the self-proclaimed "Painter of Light". The teacher talked about how he would be considered a contemporary painter, and that he received a lot of criticism from other painters about how he commercialized his art by selling on QVC. Of course, his selling on QVC opened the doors to other merchandising opportunities that made him more money than that initial offering.
That fact was probably more interesting to the adults in the room. The teaching points for the kids included defining the terms "foreground", "middle ground", and "background". The teacher also talked about how Kinkade's paintings did include depictions of light and that is partly what set him apart from others. Lighthouses were also a common theme, along with landscape scenes in general.
The kids started out with a blue background, on which they pasted colored squares, then drew waves over them with white oil pastel. They then cut out the green hill part. Eric, as usual, decided to be different and added a little dip in the middle instead of going uphill like the teacher's version. The rest of the class was spent working on the lighthouse.
Instead of making big diagonal stripes outlined in black like most of the other kids, Eric elected to make small blue and red stripes without any definite separation. That was probably what set him the most apart from the other kids. The scarf-looking thing at the top is a walkway around the top of the lighthouse. The other extended area at the top is where he drew some yellow rays of light coming off of the light.
They didn't have time to finish the whole project, as you can see compared to the teacher's example on the bulletin board. She plans to take them a few at a time on Friday to finish painting and gluing on the colored pieces of paper at the top of the page. Unfortunately, I won't be there, but hopefully I'll be able to snap a photo of the finished artwork hung on the wall when I return to school later in the month or next month.
Tomorrow I plan to blog about our busy week.
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