CartaBella

l'Artista Blog

September 6, 2010
by Bonnie Porter
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KINDERART.  Back in Mrs. Porter’s Art Studio.


Today was back-to-art-class day for my Mid-Morning Monet group.  Pencils and Paper on the table.  Sketchboards.  Name Cards.  Markers.


Ready.  Set. Go!  For warm-ups, we started drawing upside down images.  And reviewing the five basic shapes:  circle, dot, line, curve and angle.


We also walked around the room, with sketchboards in hand, to find a few things we wanted to sketch “from life”:  My Favorite Art Supplies.



August 13, 2010
by Bonnie Porter
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INTERMEZZO CLASS.  Vino Bottles:  painting on glass. 
Before going back to school, our junior guests joined us for this change-of-pace project.  Turned out to be fun for us seniors, too!  
After soaking the labels off of the bottles and drying them thoroughly, I applied a base coat of latex paint (white or cream color).  When dried, a coat of acrylic paint was applied—in this case, blue as background color for our Landscape theme.  My inspiration bottles included a Tuscany scene on a wine bottle and a Florida beach scene on a Perrier water bottle.  

As you can see, the girls followed their own intuitive path with very personal palette choices and creative images.  Turquoise and blues with playful birds and flowers emerged.  

We used acrylic paints and made sure none of our watercolor brushes got into the pot with Acrylics-Only brushes!




August 9, 2010
by Bonnie Porter
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DOLLS AND THEIR HOUSES. The first project at AG Art Camps this summer–painting doll houses for our dolls’ dolls! Doesn’t it look like a row of beach houses at Seaside? Love the color combinations each girl chose.

July 5, 2010
by Bonnie Porter
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INTERMEZZO LADIES are back in the studio! We’re attempting a looser style, learning to “let go” and let the watercolor flow! Months devoted to practice and learning, we’re more confident about facing that blank white canvas. We’re ready to trust some intuitive decisions regarding color choices, brush size, mixture of pigments, and various techniques.


As you can see from these images, each one of us are showing improvement. We all enjoyed doing our personal interpretation of this mysterious lady gazing into a secret garden.

July 5, 2010
by Bonnie Porter
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SAFARI ART CAMP, DAY 1
My first Safari theme classes were adventuresome! We worked with techniques and mediums new to me and to the young artists. For example, we mixed sand into the tempera paint and used sticks instead of brushes so that our paintings would look “primitive”.


Can you guess what we used to make all of the dots and circles on our snake painting on brown paper bags? We used Q-tips! Try it with acrylics or tempera.


Every day was an adventure with drawing and painting projects. It was fun to “draw from life” so many different carved wooden animals from Kenya. We learned some interesting, facts, too, about God’s wild animal creatures.