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What a whirlwind! Yesterday I visited students at Barrow Elementary School in Athens, GA. We had a great time. The kids even convinced me to draw on the spot for them! Here are a few pics from the event. Thanks so much to NBAF, Barrow Elementary staff and students, and Morris Gardner at the Auburn Avenue Research Library for such a wonderful time!

drawing Jermaine, who likes bikes!

Pre-K, Kindergarteners, and First graders at Barrow

watercolor demo

Here’s a quick watercolor demo I did for one of my students yesterday. As a professional, I tend to forget how much my students need to learn at this level. I am really having to think about every facet of making illustration and how to convey that clearly to a group. I am also spending a lot of time in my head remembering how it was for me as a 19 year old beginning in illustration who had no clue whatsoever what illustration was. I loved to draw and paint and tell stories, but didn’t understand how that related to my major. I didn’t understand how to begin an illustration and I definitely had no regard for developing a process for myself.

Knowing this about my own journey is really pushing me to think about how to help my students gain respect for the process. It’s important for me to explain why I am giving an assignment so that they can connect the dots when they are at home working on projects.

Yesterday after class, I spent about an hour and a half doing a quick watercolor demo in my office for one of my students. He was having a hard time understanding how one goes from thumbnail to finished drawing, to finished painting. At first I scratched my head in disbelief because the process is so common in my everyday working life, but remembering myself in college, I always traced from photographs on a projector (showing my age). I just didn’t understand that it was okay to draw on my own. I didn’t understand how to build a drawing from multiple pieces of reference and though my teachers told me to draw all of the time, I never really understood why it was so vital. I passed my classes, but not because I really grasped concepts of using reference and technique. I did what I thought my teacher wanted without thinking about “why” I made certain choices.

So, in class, I spend a lot of time asking my students “why” they make certain decisions in their work along with making them talk about their process. Reflecting on the last three weeks, I think I need to assign more homework that addresses the basics, like color, lighting, using reference, and drawing and painting technique. So far so good, but we have a long way to go.

BRAVE is the theme this week at Illustration Friday. I thought this portrait demo I did for a class I am teaching would fit the bill. In several ways:

1) It is brave of me to show an unfinished piece. In fact, a barely started piece. I was demonstrating how to start a portrait and then was kept busy individually assisting my students for the rest of the session.
2) Teachers have to be brave to do demos in general. There is nothing like standing there in front of a class for a little performance pressure! Added to it, is that you need to talk, explain what you are doing and answer questions, while producing something the students will find worth emulating.
3) This model, whom I have used frequently, strikes me as a brave soul. Also an artist, trying to piece together a living with modeling and rare commissions and sales and other part-time jobs: living on the edge.

We all artists have to be brave, and also a little strange, to do what we do.

Lily stepped back to get her canvas - so - into perspective. It was an odd road to be walking, this of painting. Out and out one went, further and further, until at last one seemed to be on a narrow plank, perfectly alone, over the sea.

~Virginia Woolf, from To the Lighthouse

When I was first developing my current style of Colored Pencil work I checked out every book I could find on the topic, and then went out and bought my favorite ones. One of these books was The Colored Pencil: Key Concepts for Handling the Medium by Bet Borgeson. Wow! Now the author of that book has selected one of my step-by-step demos to be included in a new online directory of demonstrations called Might Art Demos and Tutorials . You'll find lots of great work in lots different styles and mediums. And see how it's done. There are even some cool videos! Like Tim Burton- Speed Painting by Nico Di Mattia. Check it out!

Harvest started this week with swathing (cutting the crops -- the row they fall in is called a swath), and the first killing frost arrived Wednesday night. The second one, last night, and the furnace kicked in for good measure. Goodbye tomatoes, cosmos, and zinnias, and hello, happy pantry and busy days. Or busy pantry and happy days. My week in numbers: Poem for Poetry Friday: one, and it's

Chicken Spaghetti’s Poetry Friday this week highlights a piggy limerick. I enjoyed the quotation of a limerick interwoven with her line-by-line critique, which seems to be heading towards creating a new form of comic verse… I think Edward Lear would approve! We have been reading and reciting Lear’s limericks on and off over the school holidays, following the visit of a friend who started inventing them at the dinner table. My younger son’s love of playing with words until they are transmuted into something not-quite-completely different is fully satisfied by Lear’s Nonsense Alphabets, which he loves reading aloud with me and then chewing over on his own afterwards:

A was once an Apple-pie,
Pidy
Widy
Tidy
Pidy
Nice insidy
Apple-pie

And so on…

We were also bowled over in a Devonshire pottery (on our way home from Cornwall) when we were regaled with a complete rendition of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky – truly inspiring! By chance, we had been listening to a dramatised recording of Alice’s Adventures through the Looking Glass in the car so the boys were able to join in in parts, thus gaining more kudos than they truly deserved!

Now I really must seek out Sukumar Ray’s collection of nonsense poetry, Abol Tabol, as chosen by Swapna Dutta in a Personal View for PaperTigers. Do any of you have a favorite of his that you would recommend – or any other nonsense poetry for children?

And I sure hope my daughter's sixth-grade English teacher is reading this. A limerick, unlike some other forms of verse, does not have a restricted syllable count. It's got a stressed beat pattern.

Limericks are five-line poems, almost always humorous, and quite frequently bawdy. Edward Lear is sometimes credited with inventing them, but they existed a good 100 years before his birth in published form.

They are a song-based poem, with common wisdom being that they came from a tavern song (hence the humor and bawdiness references). If you're a musical type (and I'm not just talking to here), you will understand when I tell you that limericks are recited in 6/8 time, and begin on a pickup to the first "measure."

I will write it out for you as best I can -- ta is a pickup (the 6th beat of a 6-beat measure). Capitalized Da is a stressed syllable, and lowercase da is an unstressed syllable of the poem's text. The numbers in parenthesis are actually the count of the rest, when you've paused at the end of the line.

ta Da da da Da da da Da (2-3-4-5-)
ta Da da da Da da da Da (2-3-4-5-)
ta Da da da Da (2-)
ta Da da da Da (2-)
ta Da da da Da da da Da

They often begin "There once was . . . ", but not always. They are almost always in rhyme, as follows: AABBA (all three long lines rhyme, and the two short lines rhyme with one another).

Sometimes, the last stressed beat has syllables after it -- they cut into the "rest" time, but the beat goes on just the same.

Examples:

A wonderful bird is the Pelican,
His bill can hold more than his belican.
He can take in his beak
Food enough for a week;
But I'm damned if I see how the helican.
&emsp &emsp by Dixon Lanier Merritt

or, for a mildly bawdy one:

There was a young lady from Lynn,
Who thought that to love was a sin;
But when she was tight,
She thought it quite right,
So everyone filled her with gin.

Again, there's no ACTUAL syllabic requirement, although truly, 10 is the most you can fit in a long line, and seven is the most for the short lines. (Minimums are pretty much 8 and 5.)

Then why, I ask you, did my daughter's teacher send home a sheet telling them they had to count syllables in order to write limericks, with no regard for the stressed meter of the poem? *Heavy sigh*

And I offered to come in and do a poetry presentation if she wanted, but they're pressed for time and jamming poetry into 5 days at the end of the school year. Not that that's kept her from requiring the kids to write an entire book of poetry using her incorrect patterns. (You should see what she said a cinquain was -- it was also all wrong, because she told them it was a certain number of words per line, when the key to a cinquain is syllables Blurgh.)