31 Days - Day 6

This is how I left it last night on Day 6. Got a class this afternoon, so getting these cleaned and back in the boxes is key.  From here on I'll end the classes 10 minutes early, and make the cleaning and putting away a lesson in hue and value...

And I did manage to get this one done.

"No Giant" 9x12 pastel on light gray Pastelmat

31 Days - Day 5

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.  I did have a disclaimer at the beginning of this project  that said, if there's not a finished painting at the end of the day, there would at least be a Teaching Nelson Telson curriculum coloring page or an underpainting.  That said, I have both.

Since it's getting cold, I am also getting ready to move my teaching operation back into the house - which means I need to clean and organize the boxes I use with the kids.  The last time I did it, my BFFitWWW (that's Best Friend in the Whole Wide World) Patsy Hamel helped me.  We took the entire New Year's weekend of 2012.

I must say, the kids have done a pretty good job over the past nearly 3+ years keeping the colors and values where they need to be, but not quite.  And they are so dirty.

So I took a screen and shop vac to the boxes.  They're still really dirty but not so much so.

But in the meantime, I knew I had to make a painting.  So, on Pastelmat light gray I started one.  

Oh, but wait.  Before that I made a coloring page for the Teaching Nelson Telson curriculum.  This counts as #5 of 31!

Here's the underpainting of the next work:

Pastelmat is so different than the supports I usually use.  It sucks the stuff in...

I vacuumed them out. Here's how far I got with the boxes:

Tomorrow, it's the organizing.  Sounds easy unless you have 100% color acuity.

By the end of the day, this will be tomorrow's painting.

"No Giant" Get it?

31 Days - Day 4

I loved how the light was hitting these poppies in front of a friend's house on Atlantic Street last summer so I took a bunch of pictures with my phone.

 #4 of 31 "Eye Popping"  9x9 pastel on light blue colourfix

And congratulations to current and past students of mine for getting ribbons in the Young at Art show at the Plymouth Center for the Arts.  Well done!

Olivia's

Sadie's

Scotty's

Lyla's

Sadie and me

31 Days - Day 3

Another perfectly gray day for making art inside.  I had a private student this morning, so it was the best excuse to fulfill my daily obligation.  We went out in the wind and spewing rain and picked the last of my zinnias and flowers, and made a little still life to work from.  It was a wonderful way to bring some sunshine to this stormy day. 

The Setup

First we made value studies to see how the composition worked.

Then we made underpaintings.

Choo's under

my under

Then we fixed them with alcohol.  While we waited for them to dry, we ate fresh apple cake I'd just taken out of the oven. 

Nice job, Choo!

#3 of 31
"Last Hurrah" 9x12 on UART 500.

No better way to spend a stormy day!

31 Days - Day 2

The rain has been coming down for a few days, and it's blowing like stink with Hurricane Joaquin stirring things up. 

Looks like I'll have to move back into the house really soon because it's too cold to paint at the Top of the World.  I was chilled to the bone after being over there for not even an hour, but I'm bound and determined to post a pic a day, so here it is:

"Broken Brella"
9x12 on gray colourfix

31 Days - Day 1

Today begins an exercise in scheduling and discipline.  My pastel artist friend Kim Morin Weineck just completed her 30 in 30 (30 paintings in 30 days) for the month of September.  She inspired me to take on this kind of self-imposed challenge.

I'm going to do a variation where I paint for one hour (or more) a day, and post the result.  Kim did thirty 8x8 pastel paintings.  Since I already had one on the easel (12x24), I'll start with it (so, I guess this is really 33 days, or maybe I'll be done before Halloween).  Disclaimer: I might count Teaching Nelson Telson curriculum activity drawings as part of this if I'm too strapped for time.

How it was 9/29, wish I'd taken a pic when it was just the underpainting last Thursday...

9/30 - almost done

One of my most favorite places in the world, Gurnet Creek, where you can float around at high tide and see beauty everywhere you look.

Up the Creek

12x24 pastel on Uart 500

Terry Ludwig makes some great colors including his Intense Darks and Shades of Nature that I employed here.  Also, I love Unison BV (blue violets) for the clear sky, and Sennelier darkest green 179 and a really intense dark blue.  I also really like the texture of Girault pastels, there's something magical about the way they are soft but can still cut a sharp line.

Curriculum, baby

Hope everyone had a great summer; I certainly did.
Max and I had a wonderful whirlwind propaganda drop at the ILA conference in St. Louis in July.   Everybody there seemed to know Dr. Lars Helgeson, so it was very cool to talk curriculum agenda and hand out brochures and books.  Next year's conference is in Boston. 

As we speak, twenty of Dr. Lars' students in his Life Science for Elementary School course at University of North Dakota are reading Nelson Telson and thinking about all sorts of ideas and activities for the curriculum.  Meanwhile, I'm making coloring pages.

Over the past few weeks Dr. Lars and I were hustling to get our grant application for curriculum development submitted to the NIH.  This is very exciting, and hopefully they'll agree that the Teaching Nelson Telson curriculum is something well worth funding.  

While putting the application together, we brought some awesome horseshoe crab experts onboard:  Glenn Gauvry, Horseshoe Crab Guy from ERDG www.horseshoecrab.org, Gary Kreamer the Green Eggs and Sand guy from the Delaware Division of Fish and Wildlife, and keeper of the Teacher Toolbox at horseshoecrab.org, and Allen Burgenson, Manager of Regulatory Affairs at Lonza Walkersville, Inc., a biotech/pharmaceutical company that makes lots of LAL.  He sits on the ASMFC (Atlantic States Fisheries Commission) for the horseshoe crab, and is biomedical industry representative on the joint team of ASMFC and the Shorebirds Commission.  We are so lucky and fortunate to have these specialists on our committee.  Now I need to find a Wampanoag person. 

They're not dead horseshoe crabs, they are molts.

If you have ever wondered how the heck a horseshoe crab gets out of its shell to leave those molts, legs and all, check this out and wonder no more: Molting Horseshoe Crab