Tuesday, April 17, 2007 ;
4:38 AM
Must backtrack to last Wed...
11 Apr 2007
Went to Discovery for ds1's 2nd art lesson.
Before lesson, they roamed around as usual. To helicopter pad, farm area and so on.
At the farm area, ds1 fed hay bales to the horse, insisted in wearing the cowboy stuff and also climbed onto the horse to "ride" it. Well, both ds did this before, so I was just observing from the side. Who knows... ds1 galloped too happily on the horse, and then decided to step off the horse suddenly. I didn't actually see the fall too, cos I was looking at ds2 "harvesting" some carrots from the veg patch area.
Next thing I saw was ds1 wedged between the horse and a wooden stage. The stage is not visible in this pic, it lies just next to the horse on the other side. It is where little toddlers can mount the horse from. Between the stage and the horse was a gap. Apparently ds1 stepped right into the gap when he dismounted the horse by himself. And fell through.
Although his body was thin enough to fall right through the gap, his head wasn't. So his poor jaws and cheek slammed against the stage's edge and broke his fall, but wedged his head tight. His feet weren't even touching the ground yet.
So I rushed to extract him gently from above. Naturally, his cheek was red and starting to swell. Next post I will post a pic that I took of a grand bruise, but the pic was too dark, can't see clearly. He cried of course, loud enough for a lot of people to look at us. But the good thing about kids is they are easily distracted and they never know the real seriousness of things. So as long as I pretended it wasn't serious, he would dismiss it too. Thus he carried on playing.
But inside me, I felt heartache, especially when I look at that gap between the stage and the horse. Oh man, if I fell that way, my jaw would have been dislocated! After that I had to discreetly and sneakily observe his cheek and jaw, checking it regularly to see if the swelling continued to worsen. Fortunately when I offered him snacks, I saw his jaw moving naturally to munch on the cookies. At that point I think I was reassured that he is alright. Good thing he is quite thin and light, so the fall wasn't too bad.
The art class was quite fun and not messy this week. The great artist studied was: Frenchman Georges-Pierre Seurat (1859-1891). [notice how a lot of great artists or musicians in the past die young?)
Technique worked on was: Pointilism.
Seurat would painstakingly produce works that gave a large beautiful picture but were actually composed of dots/ points.
Below are some examples, taken from these websites:
www.abcgallery.com/S/seurat/seurat61.htmlhttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Georges_Seurat_031.jpg
Left: Eiffel tower. Right: Sunday Afternoon on Island of La Grande Jatte.
Normally such a masterpiece will take a loooong time to complete. But with some tools, the kids did it within the 45min or so left in the lesson after her slide presentation.
(btw, last week when she did her 1st lesson on Picasso, she had prepared a long presentation but i guess she realised her target audience was too young for that, so this week, her presentation was less than 5min. :-))
1. First step, the kids were asked to draw anything they liked using crayons, on sandpaper. The sandpaper was the fine grain type.
2. Next they had to colour in very hard, such that they left no blank space within what they drew. (so that dots will come out nicely ltr)
3. Then they will bring sandpaper for teacher to iron onto a piece of white paper. The crayon bits will melt and smear onto the white paper. (use low heat to press)
4. The smearing or the print will appear as dots because of the sand grains on the sand paper. So you end up with a masterpiece that looks like "Pointilism" had been the technique employed!
Quite fun... I'll probably do it again with ds1 at home another time. You should try it too.
Below: what ds1 drew on the sandpaper. According to him, it is a pic of 2 robots at a park with a pond. (I helped him draw the tree and the sun. He drew the rest, then after he coloured, I had to touch up for him cos he left a lot of blank spaces).
Below: The ironed-on after effect... Laterally inverted, but quite neat! The kids went "wow" when the paper was peeled off the sandpaper. :-)
rainbows every day, do not worry for the morrow
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