Oh, Canada

Just returned from a week-and-a-half-long trip up to Prince Edward Island to spend some time at the little house my parents built this spring/summer. Of course, while I was there they put me to work...

The kitchen cupboards were done pretty hastily and will require another trip to finish. And no, of course I didn't plan it that way. >_> What would make you think that?

We also made the obligatory trip to Green Gables, and to Lucy Maud Montgomery's birthplace. It was nice to see it not blanketed with three+ feet of snow, as has been the case every other time I've visited Canada. I'm already excited to visit next summer, and hopefully to get a set of the 'Anne' books for the cottage. It's a perfect place to curl up with a book and read!

Bookstore Mural

I see I completely failed to update during the month of August. :/ But it was because I was busy! Jennifer and Andy Gyurisin of Winchester Book Gallery, a great independent book store, hired me to paint a mural for them. I'd done one for the shop a few years ago, on canvas. This time, I got to paint on location, in the children's section.

Andy and Jen had the idea of a 'feast of books'. On the first wall, I painted books growing on trees and kids harvesting them. On the second wall, I painted a 'book bakery', where blank pages go to be filled with ideas, words, and pictures. The third and final wall was where everyone ends up - at a 'book banquet'.









More pictures and information on the Book Gallery's facebook page, and in this album!

School's out for summer!

Well, almost. Yesterday was my final day of teaching. We still have two weeks left of school, but from here out, it's testing, cleaning, and parties. No more classes! I find myself bouncing when I should be walking.

As promised, the middle school mural...



It's come along farther now, but this is how it looked when we sent in the picture for the contest. The turtles and eels are more detailed, and we have some great, stripey lionfish keeping the puffer fish company around the coral. I think the kids did a really excellent job with the gradation on the water - we were painting on gravel at the time, but I think the little white spots look like light in the water.

Also, the second of the auction portraits.

What I Did Today

It's nice to close a day having tangible proof that you did something. This is the wooden stand that the air conditioner sits on in my classroom. It used to be white, and now it's not. I think it draws the eye away from the grotty carpet quite nicely, don't you?

Whaling Walls

Every Friday when I was in middle school, I would walk the couple of blocks from school to my piano teacher's house. I was never the first lesson of the afternoon - in nice weather I'd sit outside and do my homework, but most of the time I'd come in and sit on her couch. She had a coffee table book full of art by Robert Wyland, otherwise known as "that guy who paints life-size whales". Years later, taking the train from New York to DC, I'd keep an eye out for the "Whaling Wall" in Wilmington. Maybe it's a Thomas Kinkade thing, where it's considered hokey to like commercial art, but I've got to respect anyone who's found something they enjoy doing, cornered the market on it, and turned it into a profitable endeavor. Besides, Wyland's murals are pretty darn cool.

So when an administrator at my school told me she'd signed us up to do our own mural for a contest set up by the Wyland Foundation, I was excited. My middle school class is the perfect age for it, so we looked at Wyland murals online and did lots of sketches of different sea creatures. Finally, each kid picked an animal he or she wanted to be responsible for, and did a detailed sketch. I took the drawings home, and came up with a composition that would fit all of them.



As a teacher, I struggle with control of the big picture stuff - this definitely came to the surface on the yearbook. I erred on the side of controlling dictator that time, as I've seen books where the advisor was absent and the senior section had each student's "nickmane" (amongst many, many other mistakes). But most of the time in art, the process is more important than the final product, and the kids just want to get good and messy. I feel like this is one of those grey areas. So my sketch is just that - a sketch - and we're making changes as we go. I doubt we'll finish by the contest deadline (Thursday), but it'll be something nice to hang up in the gym.