Hello blogland!
This HUGE (30x40) canvas is a fund raising project for our elementary school, my daughter's fourth grade class were the artists. (I love being the class mom, so much fun to spend time in the classroom meeting her friends.) Our school is having a fund raiser to raise money to open a "book room". It is designed for the school's library to have multiple copies of the same book. As part of our silent auction contribution, I prepped the canvas and painted the trunk of the tree and then spent over an hour in her classroom helping the kids create the "fingerprint flowers".
I've been on a tree kick recently. Something in the air, I suppose. I know, as many artist, when there is something in my brain, I simply have to paint it out. These trees painted on dictionary pages have fascinated me for over a month now, I've painted three of them. This one, however, was the first.
Here are a few step by step photos of the process of prepping the canvas. I have an old dictionary I keep just to defile in the name of art, the pages are Mod Podged to the canvas. (*note...watch the words on the pages before you glue them down. :) I noticed a few that I wouldn't want to be front and center for a kid to giggle and snort about!)
Then I aged the canvas even further.
Knowing most of the branches would be covered with kid fingerprints, I paid attention to the lower part of the trunk. The branches have very few low and high lights, and note a few "flowers" from my kids to test out if a fourth grader would easily understand the instructions.
Here is her teacher adding her fingerprints.
Then a shot of one of the groups of kids working away. They LOVED creating this. I had them layer on color, greens first, then moving into the pinks and finally the whites. I kept the paper towel on the lower part of the painting as a reminder to them to put no "fingerprint flowers" beneath that line.
**note** Here are the instructions I gave the kids. (First, I had several of the colors I wanted that group to work with poured onto paper plates. I used high quality acrylic paints found at Michaels. Greens first, 3 or 4 in varying colors, but in the same color family, then a plate of 3 or 4 pinks, then a plate of white and beiges). I told them to use their fingers to create "leaves on the tree". The fingerprints were to go along the sides of the branches, don't completely cover the branches (you need the contrast of the brown showing through). I also told them to concentrate on what a real tree looks like. The leaves are concentrated along the edges of the tree, so we placed more finger prints (fingers dipped in paint) along the edges of the painting.
We have over 20 kids in the class, and I had them at the table in groups of 5. We then did two complete rounds of kids. It took a LOT of fingerprints to cover the canvas. At the half way point, we propped the canvas up, we all stood back and declared it need MORE fingerprints! It took us about 1.5 hours to complete the fingerprint part.
I brought the canvas home and repainted some of the brown branches back in...we got a little crazy with the fingerprints. I also added some cute little bluebirds, then took it back to the classroom for the kids to admire.
You can see the layers of color here...green in the back, then the pinks, then the beiges and whites. And the cute little bird :)
Here is the finished painting hanging in my house, just temporary, of course!
I hope we raise a ton of money!
