Art from kids and me

Yesterday I taught an art class for our home school co-op. I snapped a few pictures of the lesson. This is the warm-up exercise I do for them. They work on drawing several patterns that I make up. It helps them begin to analyze shapes and spatial relationships. Surprisingly, they beg me to make more patterns for them and very unwillingly give up the exercise to begin the real lesson. 

We learned about the different kinds of lines, and how they communicate motion or stillness. These pics are from the free-time art, where they made whatever they wanted and explored all the mediums.

Here is some my art from the past week.  It's a painting I worked on when my children were at the co-op on Tuesday. Some lovely ladies carpooled and took my kids to school, so I was blessed to stay home and make the tough choice between reading in bed all morning (isn't old British literature so alluring? I love it! My favorite authors are Charles Dickens and Jane Austen!) or painting in my studio. My unfinished painting called to me from the studio and won. It was a study in Van Gogh's techniques (just in case you can't tell....my painting hardly looks like his, so I added the clarification).