Well, I just launched my Kickstarter project to raise funds for student created community street banners. Here is the link:
http://kck.st/fhbHwt

It seems that such crowd fundraising may be a good alternative to the traditional grant route. A few days ago the Wall Street Journal wrote an article, Tapping the Crowds for Funds, about this growing way of fundraising and the article mentioned Kickstarter.

Self Portraits

Above: Quick child's drawing without mirror.

Above and below: Careful pencil portrait study by six year old child with a mirror.

One of the most interesting and challenging art classes to teach is self portraits. We tend to get self conscious and want our creations to look just
like us. The key to loosening up people is to first have them draw a happy face or generic face in 30 seconds...then have them take their time creating their portrait with a mirror while using principals of facial proportions...these second drawings always end up much more expressive and capture better the essence of a face. The artist feels accomplishment at the end when assessing the difference between his/her first drawing and second drawing.

As an introduction to self portrait drawing, my lesson will visit the portrait works of Johannes Vermeer we will look at how he used light and shadow to define the face. Using the interactive whiteboard, we will overlay lines demonstrating principals of facial proportion.

Above: Johannes Vermeer: Girl with a Pearl Earring. (from arteyfotografia.com)
overlaying principals of facial proportions.

Introduction to Johannes Vermeer:
We will visit the Essential Vermeer , a fabulous site with much information to explore as one rolls over the painting with the cursor. One can even listen to snippets of music from Vermeer's contemporaries at this site. There is also information on the theory that Vermeer used the camera obscura in the creations of his painting.Above: Camera obscura portrait. Observe the blurry lines, soft edges and strong darks. Do you think there is similarity with Veermer's softness of painting?

If we have time we will be looking at http://www.flong.com/projects/zoo/ as a site showing unique examples of contemporary digital portraiture and we will briefly discuss the use of value to create contours both in the digital art and works of Vermeer and van Eyck.

LESSON PLAN: PORTRAIT DRAWING

Step 1: Fold a piece of paper in half. Draw the simplest of faces, a happy face, in one half. Draw a quick portrait of yourself on the other half. (timed one minute) Compare the two. Is there a big difference?

Step 2. You will now create a more detailed portrait using a mirror for reference. But first, we need to think of composition: symmetrical or asymmetrical? Is your face peering at you as if through a window and we only see part of your face? Does your face fill the page? Or are you quietly sitting in the middle of the page?
Step 3: Draw lightly the egg shape of your face where you want it on the page.
Step 4: Lightly divide that egg shape in half horizontally. Your eyes will go on this half way line.(complete step by step lesson info will be posted here soon.)

Assessment:
Did the student's portrait use principals of facial proportions properly?
Did the student use a dynamic composition?
Did the student use proper hatching techniques?
Did the student pick a consistent light source for shading?

Students walk around tables and give critique of each other's work. Have them say what they find interesting about each portrait. Then have them address above assessment questions.

Extension Project: Simple Camera Obscura:

As an extension project, students can create these at home and observe for themselves how camera obscura images share the deep darks and soft lines of Vermeer's paintings.
Detailed instructions are here at Make It.
I stuck a digital still camera into the camera box to take the round photo portrait at beginning of posting. I will be bringing in my inelegant camera obscura to school for the kids to test out. I think the key to making it work well is to also drape viewer and much of camera box with a black cloth.


Above: tube with black paper on one end and wax paper on the other.

Above: Wax Paper covers one end of tube.Above: Black paper covers the other end. Punch a push pin in the middle of the black paper to create a tiny hole.

Box to stick tube in. I first wrapped tube in a paper cone and then stuck it in the box.

See below:
Below:The end of the tube with the push pin hole faces out the back.

Contrast, Pattern & Evolution

MOTH PATTERN PRINTS
Overview: We will examine pattern, texture and value shifts in nature. We will look at two artists work and we will be creating mixed media rubbings of moths using lace, crayon and paper.

Elements of Art addressed: texture and value
Science component: VoiceThread observations of industrial melanism. This component addresses California 3rd grade Science, Life Sciences Standards 3.0.
Art History: Francisco de Goya and contemporary artist Robert Hague

Lead in:
Animals often have interesting textures and patterns. What role do these features have?
The black and patterned peppered moth populations changed drastically during the Industrial Revolution in England. Soot blackened the trees and killed the lichen growing on the trees. The new darkened environment set into motion changes in the number of patterned moths and the number of black moths. How? This is a classic example of industrial melanism, or genetic darkening of species in response to pollutants. I have posted a VoiceThread exercise for students. (link will be by invitation only once project begins).
Source images for moths: Olaf Leillinger, Wikimedia Commons.
Source image for bark: Chris Luczkow.

ARTIST INSPIRATION:
In each class we will be briefly exploring other artist's works. Here are two for this project:
Contemporary artist Robert Hague created these pieces below. They beautifully illustrate pattern and value shifts while both unveiling and hiding ghostly silhouettes. The lace patterns evoke the era of late 1880s's and the advent of the Industrial Revolution.


Francisco de Goya's uses texture and value contrast to create focal points, balance and tension in his political and allegorical images .

Credit: Francisco de la Goya, Donde hay ganas hay mana. National Galleries of Scotland

Credit: Francisco de la Goya, No llegan a tiempo. Arno Schmidt Reference Library
LESSON PLAN PROCEDURE:
Using crayons, coffee cup holder and lace scraps, students will create their own moth rubbings exploring texture and contrast.
1. Hand out texture boards (matt boards with lace or flattened coffee cup holders glued to them)
2. Students choose one colored crayon. Students place piece of paper over rubbing board.
3. Students peel crayon wrapper back half way and brush flat side of crayon over paper to create rubbing.
4. Students take another piece of paper and create a rubbing using same crayon but a different texture board.
One of these two rubbings should be darker than the other.
5. Students cut out a moth shape from one piece of paper.
6. Students cut out a factory or tree shape from the other piece of paper.
7. Students glue background rubbing (tree or factory shape) to a white piece of paper.
8. The moth shape is glued on top.
9. Students answer questions on VoiceThread as to which moth they would eat in frame A and frame B if they were a bird.

CLOSURE:
1. Is the moth visible in your collage? Why or why not?
2. How does value impact visibility of objects in the rubbings, in Goya work, in Hague's work?
3. How did the soot impact the visibility of moths on the trees?

Assessment Based on Objectives:
Did student create a piece including all components requested?
Did student successful record voice or written thoughts on VoiceThread?
Did student answer VoiceThread questions correctly?
Did student successfully create an image with value shifts strong enough to define the outline of the moth against the background?

I visiting the Euphrat Museum at De Anza College today to drop off some items for an installation and to photograph images of my students' work to share with them. Today was the last day of workshop series I was conducting at Nimtiz Elementary in Sunnyvale, CA. The workshop series focused on exploring leadership skills through art. The goal was also to encouraging students to develop their personal visual and verbal vocabularies. I greatly enjoyed the children and hope to see them again next year in workshops.

Egyptian Headdress Craft at de Young Museum

On Friday night I conducted an Egyptian Art Deco headdress activity at the de Young Museum for their closing Friday Night event for the King Tut exhibit. It was a blast. I had my children as my assistants. Here is a link to the PDF files if you want to print these out and try them out at home or in a class. These templates at a new textile blog site for my textile research. I haven't figured out how to embed Scribd files in Blogger and for the other blog I am using Weebly; it is easy to insert the files so you will find I have posted them there instead of here.

Anyway here are some images from the evening. It was so fun!! I will be adding more images soon.





















Above: This woman was fabulous!
Below: My children were great models and assistants:
















Below: This guy spent a long time perfecting his headdress. He and his friends were so dedicated to their creations that they sprawled out on the floor when there was no more room at the tables. I had printed 100 of each of the four designs and only had a small stack of maybe 30 afterward. I had also cut around 200 bands and we ran out around 7:40 (event ran close to 9:00 pm). We were able to get some white card stock paper and we cut those for the headband strips. (Thanks, intern, Alex!)




















Below: This young artist was very creative.
She started to hole punch the gold paper and add the gold punched pieces as decorative elements to her design. Many visitors started to do this, too, after I shared with them what this artist had done.

Japanese Purse Workshop

I am designing a Japanese purse making workshop for Serentripity Learning Vacations that will be conducted at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum and at the residence of Yoshi of Yoshi's Restaurants/Jazz Clubs. I will be conducting these workshop once in September, November and December.

The hour long workshops focus on the reuse themes in Japanese textiles such as boro (work clothes made of stitched together scraps) and sashiko stitching. The base of the purse is a recycled plastic sushi tray. The embellishments reflect a blend of contemporary Japan with the creative thriftiness of Meji era Japan: plastic sushi grass stitched alongside mini shoyu bottles, pearls, and Japanese Delica beads. Regarding the base fabric, we will use recycled Filipino noodle bags (thank you Anne Marie!) overlayed with organza silks. This use of recycle fabrics and materials is a theme common in my work as I am greatly inspired by the Japanese Hawaiian Plantation culture of my father's family.


















I have also created several manga "kawaii" characters that participants can iron onto the fabric of their purses. Contemporary Japanese manga and the recent "Kawaii" graphic style movement have roots in Japan's reaction and exposure to U.S. culture during its occupation after WWII. A great reference book about this period of transformatio in Japan is Embracing Defeat. I found this book fascinating because for me it pinpointed some of the sources of divergence in culture and perspective between Japanese Hawaiians and Japanese in Japan.

Below are these iron-on characters. They are decorated with fragments of vintage Chinese and Japanese food wrappers. I created them in Photoshop and used bits of wrappers I scanned from my collection.















































Below: A butterfly iron-on image created from my Asian food wrapper collection:



















I have created a prototype purse. The cord slider is a mini shoyu bottle (in the shape of a pig). The thick red cording my father picked up for me a few years ago in China.























This purse below has the image of a kiri leaf which is of historical importance. It is a bombing leaflet that the U.S. forces dropped on the Aleutian Islands when the Japanese occupied them during WWII. It alludes to the early falling of Kiri leaves which is a bad omen in Japan. These leaf leaflets warn the Japanese soldiers that their efforts are futile. It also was ironic imagery as there are no trees of mention on these sparsely vegetated islands. I included this image on my purse as the end of The War led to the absorption things Western in occupied Japan. It lead to modern Japan's embrace and zeal for all that is new and marked it's separation from Japanese in diaspora who clung to the thrify Meji Era ways. This purse mixes these two directions.























Detail: Sushi grass and mini fish shoyu bottle embellishment. The shoyu bottle is stuffed with pink produce netting to give it color.

Kite Handles for Wornick Jewish Day School Workshop

Above: kite handles

May is a busy month. I think many schools schedule their art programming towards the end of the year. I have a fun artist residency coming up on Wednesday atThe Wornick Jewish Day School in Foster City. I will be conducting kite making workshops. There will be about a hundred students participating.











I made a hundred kite handles from cardboard cereal boxes, tea boxes, and cracker boxes. I could have bought plastic kite handles, but making them reflects the way kites are made in most of the world...with recycled objects.

Emily and I added bits of Asian food wrappers to each kite handle to pretty them up and to illustrate that we can use mundane artifacts from our daily lives to make things.

Preschool Mother's Day Card Workshop

Today I conducted a workshop at my daughter's preschool. It was refreshing and fun to teach such young artists. I love watching their chubby little hands assembling the parts. All the pictures I took make me smile but I am only posting a few. The last time I taught at a preschool was way back when my son was in preschool and we did a paper making workshop. The kids had a blast with the water and sponges. Today was more sedate and the preschoolers made Mother's Day cards using a mixture recycled Asian food wrappers.




















Below: My daughter showing her creation. She came into this three year old class to help me do the workshop. She handed out materials and assisted. She has been attending my art workshops since she was two years old and perhaps she will retain some memory of the experiences. She is a good helper now and looks forward to handing stuff out and helping other children.














































Below: Materials such as chopstick sleeves, plastic sushi grass and Chinese food wrappers made up the flowers.



















Yesterday I was at a meeting of an Asian women artists group (AAWAA) up in San Francisco and I learned that quite a few had postponed their art for decades as they raised their children. It is difficult to pursue one's artistic visions while raising children. Being an artist can be quite a selfish pursuit and as a mom it is easy to feel frivolous and guilty pursing one's art. But I believe it is worthwhile to at least attempt to strike a balance being both an artist and a mom. I make chicken soup from scratch when my children are sick, cook every dinner and pick the children up from school and drive them to all their activities, but I am by no means successful in my balancing act! There are times when I know I am too absorbed in my work or feel I am dragging my kids to my various art teaching activities or drag them to some sort of scarp yard for materials. There are times when I am really tired and grumpy in the morning because I stayed up late working. Sometimes being an artist and a mom is a messy intertwined journey. I certainly felt that way this past year.

My father is a toy designer and my fondest memories are of the random and a bit crazy adventures we had related to his unique job. I hope my kids will feel the same about their childhood... that my passions enriched their lives and their perspective on the world. I want them grow never questioning the value of their own creativity and I want them to grow with the desire to give voice their inner thoughts. These were of gifts of my childhood. If I fail at my juggling act here, at least they will have good fodder to be writers and can weave fantastic, absurd and true tales about their crazy upbring! Ah, just reflections as Mother's Day approaches.























I like this child's card below. She received an extra petal and did her own thing. There is no such thing as wrong in art! It looks great.