glue sky » Art

The Thinking Behind the Drawing

My mom taught me a saying: “What can you tell me about this?” I use it all the time. It’s great because it asks a child what they are drawing without saying “What is that?” It also doesn’t make you guess. “Nice….flower?” And I write it down on the work. Ero’s art is fairly simple [...]

Water and Brush

Painting on Wood

The kids painted on wood panels for Peter’s birthday. They picked their colors and content. I painted the sides whatever color they wanted when they were done (a little art trick which can be done on canvases too.) I think Lou’s will look lovely up behind the Heath vase… Isn’t that beautiful? It rivals today’s [...]

Sculpting with Reference

While sculpting the other day, Lou asked for a ball of clay. I rolled one. She began shaping it into a triangle. She said she was making a Totoro (A catlike creature from the movie My Neighbor Totoro.) She looked a little deflated that it wasn’t looking like Totoro. I said “Let’s get a picture [...]

Setting Up Proper Watercolors

Proper watercolors, tut tut! Last time I tried this things did not work out so well. The colors became a blur, the concept of mixing was lost on Lou, who was 3. Now Lou is 3.75 and I thought I would try again. Let me rephrase, she’s pestering me to paint constantly, so I thought [...]

Painting with Acrylics

My kids want to paint a lot. We don’t have one of those easels with primary colors because I am not a fan of giving little ones red, green, and blue in plastic jars. I think they will not enjoy painting if it’s always going to look like a mash up of red/green/blue on a [...]

3.5 Years – Drawing from Reference – Birds

Lou had a bad dream about a cardinal. It was pecking on her window and kept coming back. She wanted to draw the cardinal. She sat down with a crayon and thought about it. She asked me how to draw one. I said we should look it up. Our internet was down, so we broke [...]

16 Months – Real Clay

Lou, now 3.5 years old, sculpts with me all the time. For some reason I didn’t think Ero, 16 months, would get it. He thought otherwise. He climbed up the step stool and set up shop. He grabbed a little wooden tool, some terracotta and did what came naturally. He jabbed at it, sliced at [...]

Collaborative Work – Parent and Preschooler

Here’s Lou and I drawing together. I drew the outlines and she would draw the insides. She drew tomatoes on the ketchup, pizza toppings on the pizza slice, and colored in the soup can. We were looking at some wooden play foods. Drawing from reference is important to me. I used to think people drew everything out [...]

Pop That Carbon Black Paint Out

I was tired of Lou’s watercolors covered with a thin layer of black. Most painters do not use a normal black because it makes the art look muddy. They usually use a blue-black. So I got rid of the watercolor black by popping it out. Sometimes however, things need black. More on black paint.

Ornaments – Glue Sky Style

This was great. We brought out our trusty Sculpey and some old wire I had laying around. I cut the wire into strange sizes. I pulled apart the Sculpey into smaller pieces for Lou to work with. She went to town. Grammy called them “molecular.” I curved the sharp ends into spirals or circles for [...]

Mezuzah Case

We decided to make some ornaments out of Sculpey. Then I thought, Hanukkah is coming up early this year so why not make a Mezuzah case. A Mezuzah is a religious scroll that is put in a Mezuzah case and hung on the door frame. So we rolled out some Sculpey. Then we squashed the [...]