DEC 9 – DEC 13 • Students enjoy a fun and artistic project along with a holiday party. Used plastic water bottles are re-used to create a unique, environmentally friendly, hand-painted Christmas tree ornament. The tops of two bottles are cut off and the artists paint the inside using acrylic paints. The exterior looks like beautifuly colored glass, and when the two pieces are taped together, they make a nice classic ornament shape. Even the cap ring is used for a hanger.

DEC 2 – DEC 6 • Using color in shadows is essential to good artwork, and so is understanding how basic shapes like a cube are drawn. Since it’s the holiday season, we paint a red-wrapped, cube-shaped gift with a green ribbon and bow. Students learn the basics of cube shapes and accuracy, as well as mixing opposites, or compliments, to create shadow colors.

NOV 18 – 22 • Students learn how to mix colors and how they are affected by other pigments. Using a special page, they’ll mix and fill swatches for 16 colors (grades 3 – 5) or 25 colors (grades 6 – 12) in different variations of blues. The lesson continues with the Darks Color Journal using black, grays, and a few browns, in the same manner. The mixed colors use pigments from the ARTSquish program, and produce colors that artists often need to use when actually painting. Advanced students create an expressive acrylic painting on canvas from provided reference, that uses dark colors.