First day with acrylics

October 14th was the first day of acrylics with Grades 1 & 2 in the morning and then grades 5 & 6 in the afternoon.  I brought with me my large print of 'Calgary Memoirs' and my Art Suitcase.  I used the painting to give them a closer glimpse of how I create my work and all the possible materials to use for their final paintings. 

 
The kids seem to really appreciate me bringing in my work and they had a lot of questions about how it was created.  It always makes me a little nervous to show my work to big groups and to say, "See, this is what I do."  I am always a little scared that someone will say, "That looks stupid.", but they never do so I am not sure where that fear comes from.  It is in us all I guess.

I opened up my painting suitcase to great anticipation from the audience.  In the suitcase I had my acrylic paints, brushes, rags, palettes and of course my magic sands.  The suitcase was a real hit. 

After the show and tell I had the teachers running around like mad to get some supplies together.  Sorry about that teachers, I guess I figured your day wasn't hectic enough. :-).  We all really just needed to dive into the painting.  Many of the students had never worked with acrylics so it was important that they received this introduction before we got to close to final painting production.

It was a bit scary because the kids were used to working with Tempra, which is completely washable.  The acrylics are not.  I am wondering if there were a few unhappy parents later that night?  We warned the children before they started and actually, they were all as careful as possible.

The aim of the lesson was to get the children learning how the acrylic goes onto the paper, how to create texture, tones of one colour and a variety of colours with just the three primary paints.  They did a great job.