Traditional Textured Ornaments

Seasonal textured ornaments are part of the Ridgecrest tradition, dating to 2006. A couple of my favorite kindergarten students with their clay ornaments.

 The North Star Slab Roller (kind of like a pasta roller incorporated into a table top) really gets a workout at this time of the year. I use a small plastic coffee lid to cut uniform circles just the perfect size. We talk about the purpose and function of texture on the bottom of our shoe soles, and make the connection to art: adding visual interest.  The students impress a slab-rolled clay disc onto the bottom of their shoe.  The process is completed with name and date inscription and cutting a hole to hang, made by piercing the disk with a drinking straw.  When dried the textured ornaments will be fired and then students will paint their ornaments and then finish them up with glitter glue.

Time to be Thankful!

We are working on our holiday ornaments here at Ridgecrest.  We first made paper template to use to cut our slab pieces of clay, next was firing, then painting and finally adding glitter to their ornaments.  Enjoy!

 Rainbows are popular with this class!

Fall 2015! Back to the blog!

 Hard to believe that it's been a year since my last post. Going to try to  post more regularly now that I've got an iPad! It's hugely exciting that we got six iPads for the room this year, we're just waiting on the covers so that we can begin using them as a class due to the hard concrete floors that are here in the art room. Will be doing self-portraits as soon as we get the covers.

 Here are some photos of the most recent day of the dead mask from the show at Lawmdale.