Ever since I bought some kid's art project in a thrift store, I've been thinking about grade school art projects. The one that really sticks out in my mind was when we took bright-colored crayons and colored big blocks of color on a sheet. Then we crayoned all over THAT in black, then took some kind of stylus-thingie and scraped off areas of the black to make multi-colored pictures. I absolutely LOVED that, and I remember doing those pictures over and over again for MONTHS at home after I had done it at school.
For those of you with kids: Do they still do that?
I think "art" was probably my favorite class as a kid, mainly because it didn't seem to require any painful learning. And getting out the paints and the newspapers and making a colossal mess was always entertaining.
I remember one time we took these thick sheets of linoleum and x-acto knives and made these sort of block stamp thingies, which I also loved, and did on my own at home, at least until I sliced the shit out of my thumb with the x-acto knife and had to have stitches and Mom put the kibosh on that whole little project.
In junior high home ec, we had a unit where we had to sew something. I picked a stuffed hippo pattern (I don't KNOW why; I have no particular thing for hippos), and I remember I kept DOING IT WRONG and having to rip out the stitches over and over and over to finally get that damned hippo right. I still don't like to sew.
My mom didn't save any of my childhood artwork (hello, I was CHILD NUMBER 6), or any of my school papers, or any of that stuff, so I don't have any of it to look over now. How about you? Do you still have any of your childhood art?
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We did a version of that crayon thing. Instead of coloring over with black crayon, we colored over with some kind of black paint. I remember that vividly, though.
One of my other favorites was when we got to use the pastel crayons. They were always messy, but I think I always drew better with them.
I don't have any of my old artwork, and I don't think my mom ever saved anything I did for very long. I wasn't very good at art. I liked it all right, but I've never been a fan of getting messy or unstructured activities--I'm such a dork.
Yes, they still do the scratch-relief with black crayons. In general, my kid has better quality art supplies and better art instruction than I ever had -- my kid is in fourth grade and already has done charcoal sketching, pastel work, watercolor in tubes, worked on canvas with acrylic, etc. I feel like ChimpGirl the Spray-painted Macaroni Mom compared to the kids in her class.
I am art-o-phobic but I am doing my best not to pass my stupid anxieties along to Kid. She likes art a lot and since I'm not that great a housekeeper, there's always someplace in the house where art projects can sit to dry.
Oh! And I forgot about one of my all-time favorites - rolling up glossy magazine pages into leetle tubes and making "bead" necklaces. Although I guess that would be more "crafts" than "art".
They sell kits to make beads like that. Look at the craft section of Michael's. The ones you make with the kits turn out much nicer and more evenly than the ones you freestyle.
I saved some of my high school art projects - back when I was actually good at it. I saved some of my writing projects from elementary school, and they are accidentally hilarious, as opposed to teenage poetry, which is painfully hilarious.
Oh, that reminds me - I've got some scanned diary pages ready to post! *gulp*
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