Arts Alive!

I haven't written in quite a while! Making my way through the busy first 4 months of the school year with back to school nights, open houses, parent conferences, special events and holiday activities left me little time to sit down and write about the fun things I was doing.  I did manage to do a few creative things in and amongst all the job related extras.  Lucky for me I'm an art teacher, so creativity is just part of the job!
Our latest planned creative venture at my high school will come at the end of April during our week long art show and on the Saturday before the music department presents their Spring Concert!  We are calling the event "Arts Alive" and it will feature workshops in music, both choral and instrumental, a poetry workshop, and last but not least, a mixed media art workshop!  The workshops will be offered to middle school students.
I, for one, am pretty excited about it.  After meeting with the other member of my department, we decided to offer a mixed media workshop where the participants will create a collage using a variety of media including painting, collage, and printmaking.  They will begin with a watercolor background accented with papers, puffy paints, watercolors, tempera paints and colored pencils. Then they will create a fish in paint, using a block print to make the scales, attach it to the background and add some finishing touches!
We created some examples, which both of us had great fun putting together.  Hopefully, the participants in our "Arts Alive" Workshop will enjoy creating their sea life collage just as much!