MEGAfauna Summer Fellowship

This summer I worked with K-6th grade campers, making prints and a baby mammoth! This was for the Summer Spree camp at the Community Art Center.

This year's camp theme was BIG TIME, and of course having been an artist/scientist-in-residence at the Wagner for ten years, the first thing that came to mind was mammoths. 

For this project, I taught the campers about the extinction of megafauna of North America at the end of the Pleistocene, and we then used those animals as inspiration for relief prints. Campers also learned about baby mammoth mummies like Yuka and Lyuba who were frozen in ice for tens of thousands of years before being discovered by humans. We used that as inspiration to create a full sized baby mammoth of our own, using wire armature, plaster wrap, acrylic paint, and yarn.

This was my 4th year doing a summer fellowship at CAC. The other projects were: 
Pollinators, 2021 
Whose Hoo Around the World, 2019 
Big Relief!, 2018 

Pollinators: Collaborative Installation at CAC

I just made this awesome installation with K-6th grade campers at the Community Art Center!

This was for a teaching artist fellowship during the Summer Spree Art Camp. The theme this year was SPREAD YOUR WINGS, and since I was invited to also show some of my own artwork in the gallery, I showed all the mandalas for my 2020 Pollinators Calendar as well as the 100 Acts of Kindness puzzle print organized by Maria Arango Diener. For the fellowship I taught the kids all about pollinators and had them create relief prints that went into this installation. 

This was my 3rd year doing a summer fellowship at CAC. In 2018 we did BIG RELIEF! And in 2019 we did Whose HOO Around the World. 

Whose HOO Around the World (Summer Fellowship)

Owls, owls, everywhere! The last week of June I had a wonderful time doing a fellowship for the Community Art Center's Summer Spree camp. 

This year's camp theme was WIDE WORLD. Having created a whole series of linocut prints of owls, I decided to put owls at the center of my project. 

Each group of campers were assigned a list of owls particular to one region of the world. They heard folktales from cultures in that part of the world and then made relief prints of owl species from that region. We printed the owls on cloth banners and hung them all around the children's garden. So much fun! 

This was my 2nd year doing a summer fellowship at CAC. My first was last year: Big Relief! 

Student Linocuts Over Monotypes

My 2D mixed media class just finished a 3 week project where the kids:


1. First drew on a 4" x 6" piece of paper with pencil, then put the drawing under plexiglass and made monotypes, focusing on filling in the major areas with color.

2. Transferred the drawing to a linoblock and carved. NOTE: If you do this, be sure to transfer the drawing onto the block in a way so that when it is printed it will be the same orientation as the monotype prints. Otherwise the linocut print image will be backwards compared with the colored portion, as can be seen in the wild cat print below (which, incidentally, still turned out rather cool looking.)

3.) Print the carved linoblocks in black over the color monotypes.

I get a big kick out the fact that the most impressive prints were done by the littlest kid - a 6-year-old girl who did a print of her doll "Sophia".

Relief Print Leaves Workshop for Kids of All Ages

This is my last week teaching summer camp this summer at the Community Arts Center. Another teaching artist and I have 18 kids between the ages of 6 and 11 - a rather wide age spread. We spend most of our time with the kids split into 2 groups based on age, but we have occasionally come together for a big group project, and for one that I taught, I decided to do these relief print leaves.

I gave each kid 1 piece of 6" x 9" Scratch foam and 2 pieces of stiff board of the same size. I had the kids draw the shape of an imagined leaf, starting with the vein that runs down the center. The kids were invited to draw into the background and into the leaf with a pencil as much as they like.

Then they took scissors and carefully cut out the leaf while keeping the background intact as a single piece. The trickiest part is then gluing the background on one piece of stiff board and the leaf on the second piece of stiff board. The trick is making sure that the leaf is in the same position so that when they are printed they match up. This is done by first placing both the leaf and background together onto the first stiff board piece, but then only gluing down the leaf and removing the background piece afterward. Unfortunately, a couple of kids then glued their background piece down flipped, so they still didn't match up. But it did make for some interesting prints.

I encouraged each kid to print the leaf (in green) and the background (in brown) on at least 2 different colors of paper in order to be able to compare and contrast.

After a long summer of teaching camp to a lot of children, I enjoyed quietly examining this grid of finished leaf prints. So many of them seem to be fading in and out, almost disintegrating. Each is its own unique shape. And many contain curious surprise drawings and details within.

Imagined Bugs Print/Collages by 5th and 6th Graders at CAC

I am having a fantastic summer teaching kids at the Summer Spree art camp at the Community Arts Center in Wallingford. This is a set of relief prints made with foam boards made by 5th and 6th graders. I had the kids draw bugs from their imagination into the foam and we printed 4 layers of color, adding pieces of foam or scratching in more marks and darkening the color of ink with each new layer.

We were originally planning a 5th layer in black, but the effects up until that point were so fantastic and we feared accidentally covering what was already there. So we switched up plans and decided to emphasize the colors and textures by cutting out and swapping the bugs and backgrounds printed in different color schemes.

What I love best about teaching at CAC is the ability to experiment with new project ideas and change plans in the middle based on what happens with the kids in the studio. These are probably the best prints by students I've worked with since the reduction prints I did with 6th graders at Kearny 2 and a half years ago.

Children's artwork can be amazing!