Alpacas Coming To Carlsbad Art Farm

Carlsbad Art Farm Summer Camp is all about learning how to draw and paint and otherwise make art rendered from life. At Art Farm, students work in outdoor studios surrounded by 10-acres of rustic, woodsy land where they learn how to draw animals from live models. Last summer our students met Picasso the miniature mule and Kandinsky the goat, plus a host of other visiting animals: horses, burros, baby doll lambs, dogs, and more (but no swine, in case anyone is worried about that).

New this summer are two young Alpacas. They are arriving in May and will be ready to model for students coming to Carlsbad Art Farm Summer Camp starting June 15. These alpacas (photo by Mehgan Murphy) were photographed at the Smithsonian National Zoo in January. As soon as we get pictures of our alpacas I will post them (I neglected to bring my camera when I traveled to California Criations in Temecula to purchase them, but these two look very similar). One alpaca is coming prenamed "Harry Potter" because he has coloring on his forehead that looks like the boy wizard's famous lightening bolt scar. The other has yet to be named, so if anyone has a name that sounds like a good fit for a brown alpaca then reply to this post.

Interactive Art Game Explores Art During the Renaissance

The Renaissance Connection is an educational tool developed for the Allentown Art Museum's interactive educational web site. With the simple click of a mouse button, players travel 500 years into the past to discover many Renaissance innovations revealed through the Allentown Art Museum's Samuel H. Kress Collection of European art.

Be a patron of the arts. Design your own innovation. Investigate Renaissance artworks in depth. Discover how past innovations inform life today. And more, all enhanced with quirky visuals, irreverent humor, and engaging interactivity that reveal the ways that Renaissance life and culture resemble our own.

This site also features free lesson plans for teachers in the middle school grades. Using Renaissance innovations, these lessons incorporate language arts, visual arts, social studies, and math.

For example, a math and social studies lesson plan explores how patronage worked during the Renaissance.The interactive "Be a Patron of the Arts" lets players assume the role of a wealthy patron commissioning a self-portrait set to Renaissance music. And as noted, it is done with great humor. To visit the site, click here.

Recycling Calculator is Cool Tool for Kids

This post isn't really about making art, although it uses graphics to cleverly illustrate how recycling makes a difference. The "Conversionator" is found at the National Recycling Coalition (NRC). The NRC is a national non-profit advocacy group with members that span all aspects of waste reduction, reuse and recycling in North America.

My 10-year-old daughter thinks the interactive Conversionator is very cool and I can see why. It helps illustrate how recycling one family's daily waste products converts into saved trees and cleaner air. Go ahead, give it a try. Just click here.

Where Do Artists in San Diego Get Their Supplies?

This is not a comprehensive list (in fact I'm listing all of two locations). But parents ask me all the time where to go to get art supplies for their kids and I'd like to keep it simple, and I'd like to wean them off of Michael's Art Supplies.

I have nothing against Michael's, except that when it comes to fine arts supplies their prices are horribly jacked-up, their section is limited, and they don't have knowledgeable staff on hand to answer questions about the supplies they do have. If you have a child who is truly showing an interest in drawing and painting, then take them to a real fine arts supply store and encourage them to ask questions of the staff. And be ready to make a small but worthwhile investment because there comes a time when making art requires better materials (yes, that means not buying the Value Pack of one trillion paint brushes for $9.99).

A young student with a passion for drawing and painting absolutely should be introduced to and have familiarity with good quality art materials and their functions, in the same way that a promising young violinist should have access to a decent violin. Better materials handle better and get better results.That's why grown-up artists use them.

One of the things I really enjoy about teaching foundation drawing classes to middle school students is introducing them to basic art materials and then showing them the effects they can get with these materials. I issue each student a small tool box filled with a variety of charcoals, pencils, erasers, a limited range of Nupastel, white and black chalks, Conte Crayon, etc., and then set about showing them how to use these on different types of surfaces and papers.

We talk about different brands, soft and hard leads, vine versus willow charcoal, what type of charcoal pencil gets the darkest line, why different pencils come in different shapes and how to use them, what the different erasers do, etc. I want my students to be knowledgeable so that they can go into an art supply store and ask for the materials they need.

When I shop for drawing and painting supplies in San Diego County, I go to one of two places: Rhino Art Supply or Dick Blick. Since I live in North County, I usually shop at Rhino Art Supply, at 97 N Coast Highway 101 in Encinitas (at the corner of Encinitas Blvd.), an independently owned and operated art supply store that is well stocked and staffed. It also looks like actual art gets made there, which, if I were a kid, would be fascinating. But be warned, if you're a Thomas Kinkade fan you might want to stick to Michael's.

For parents in South County, Dick Blick, 1844 India St., in San Diego (in the Little Italy district), is a huge art supply store. (Dick Blick is also where I shop online for art supplies. If you're buying in quantity and can wait a week or so, that's where the best prices are.) Dick Blick is a supermarket of art supplies. Fine art students from the UCSD and San Diego State go there for their art supplies. Dick Blick also has a knowledgeable and large staff, but you need to work a little harder to get their attention.

At both stores, the prices for materials are fair. Both stores have websites (see my "Links") where you can check for discounts, coupons, etc.

SmartHistory Offers Interactive Art History

Now here's a website for art history teachers and students to salivate over. SmartHistory, funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, is conceived as an interactive Western art history textbook. It is meant to supplement those unwieldy art history textbooks that always seem to be about the size of a major metro phone book, heavy as bricks, and often real snoozers to slog through.

SmartHistory, described as a "multi-media web-book, was founded by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker, both art historians at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Harris is also director of digital learning at MoMA. SmartHistory uses a multi-media timeline along with other interactive features -- such as podcasts, YouTube clips, and Flickr -- to integrate 2,600 years of art and architectural history.

Sampling of works designated by time period are used "to demonstrate the changing role of art in the everyday evolution of human political and social structures". For example, the oil painting above, "Strayed Sheep," (1852), by the English Artist William Holman Hunt, is featured on a video podcast lecture about art during the Industrial Revolution from 1848 to 1907. Harris and Zucker use this and other art works to discuss how artists at this time were breaking away from traditional Academy notions of what subject matter was suitable for art and even from traditional ideas of formal composition. They also discuss meaning: do the sheep without a shepherd represent a breaking away from the Church of England?

Harris and Zucker began SmartHistory in 2005 by creating a blog, featuring free audio guides in the form of podcasts for use at MoMa and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They then began embedding audio files on their online survey courses. "The response from our students was so positive that we decided to create a multi-media survey of art history web-book," Harris and Zucker note on their website. "We created audios and videos about works of art found in standard art history texts, organized the files stylistically and chronologically, and added text and still images."

We're glad they did. As a supplemental teaching tool, SmartHistory is developing into a brilliant resource for the classroom.

Geordie Millar's Giant Walking Moose

Wow. I'm stunned. As you may have ascertained by now, I like drawing animals and I like drawings of animals.

Furthermore, I have a lifelong affinity for charcoal. Just love the stuff. I use it in the classroom all the time because I think it helps to loosen up students who are too wedded to the precision of line they get from a pencil (not to mention their over-dependency on erasers). I want students to get their hands dirty, work large, and to risk smudging their paper with unintended marks.

So here I was, fishing around on the Internet, when I came across Canadian Artist Geordie Millar's Walking exhibit, which is a series of 16 huge (average size 60 X 76) charcoal on paper portraits of a single female moose walking, standing, lying down, turning, and so on. It's mesmerizing as a study of an animal and as art. The website set-up to showcase the exhibit is nicely done. Just click on any of the images scrolling by and take some time to appreciate the detail. Then recall that it's done in charcoal.

What I like very much about these drawings, as a teaching tool for young students, is that they show what drawing can be. The analogy I use with students is that learning to draw well is like learning to play an instrument. It takes time, dilligence, discipline and all the rest, but the reward is that with mastery comes very tangible results. But drawing from intense observation is also a form of meditation.

In his Artist's Statement about the "Walking" exhibit, Millar notes, "Are we comfortable around animals in the wild? No. Are they comfortable around us? No. This is one of the beautiful parts of life, simply because these glimpses are so vividly intense. One moose to draw and she's still a mystery to me after all these hours of drawing."

Designing a Book Cover

The illustration at right is from a tutorial by P.J. Lynch, a highly regarded Irish illustrator of children's books (as well as many other publications). The tutorial, posted at Scamp, an Irish illustrators blogspot, takes you step-by-step through Lynch's process for designing a book cover for an edition of the classic short story, "Gift of the Magi," about a young married couple too poor to buy each other gifts one Christmas. The story is about how they each make a sacrifice to secure a simple gift for each other.

Lynch started by sketching out the images from photographs he had taken of models. He then scanned his drafts into Photoshop and manipulated the composition, noting that he was somewhat new to Photoshop. He also used it as a tool to block in color areas. Later, he used this manipulated draft as a source for his final hand-painted image.

Just as important as the images in his step-by-step tutorial is a close reading of Lynch's text. He talks succinctly about how he uses his models and photographs as source material, but then he talks about how he rearranges elements for best compositional effect.

For example, at one point Lynch moves a bare wood table from the right side of the composition to the left side, noting, "the compositional breakthrough was when I saw that the table with the gift on it could be used as a way to lead the eye in, as well as helping to define the space and telling a little bit about Jim and Della’s impoverished state."

These are complicated concepts for young artists, the idea that composition "leads the eye" through a picture or that simply rearranging elements on the picture plane can somehow provide information about the people in the picture that wasn't there before. But particularly engaged middle school student, and certainly a high school student would benefit from being introduced to these artistic concepts as part of their studio art instruction.