I could form a baseball team

When I was young, a neighbor had a house full of boys and my father use to say, "Pretty soon they could form their own baseball team."

If only he was alive to see my Wednesday afternoon art class!

I could literally form my own baseball team.

9 boys!

9 lovely, creative, energetic little boys.

So before the first class, when I was trying to figure out what project to run, I decided to go to the house expert, my 19 year old son.

And when I asked him what kind of art project he would want to do at that age, he told me build something.

hmmmmm

I had been thinking about doing a Cezanne inspired paint project with palette knives but my son's words resonated with me and what was once a project with palette knives transformed into clay.

The still life I was going to arrange with a bowl of fruit for the boys to paint became a project where they would build a bowl of fruit with clay.

We started by creating slump bowls.

How much fun they had dropping their rolled out clay over a styrofoam bowl to shape.

Then I told them they could add any details they wanted to their bowls and showed them out to "glue" on additional clay pieces properly.

(scoring and slipping)

And like all creative processes, some boys took off on a different path than expected and bowls became nest.

I didn't think we would get past creating bowls (and nest) at one point but when I brought out the aluminum foil, I had their undivided attention once again.

WHY was I bringing out aluminum foil?! they wanted to know.

And when I told them we would use it to first shape our fruit (or birds) and then wrap our clay around it so the clay would dry faster, they were game.

Some boys continued to design their bowls while others were proficient at creating so much fruit I wasn't sure it would all fit in the bowl!

I had real apples, pears and bananas for them to really study in order to get all the details they might not think about from heart.

I pulled out bird reference for the boys creating nest.

In the end, I was so impressed with each boys' creation.  What's more, I gained a lot of insight about how they approached their art and how open they were to direction with a project that was not intimidating to anyone.

A week later, they painted the dry clay with acrylic paints, mixing their own colors from a primary color palette.  Then I sprayed them with a high gloss varnish.

The other classes have all admired them throughout the week and the boys all seemed quite proud and thrilled to take them home today.

I think when looking at the pictures it's easy to see why, each boy definitely hit a home run.

8 year old

7year old

6 year old

7year old

Although this artist created a nest with a bird and egg, his intention is that the bird will not be in the nest.  He wanted to display it separately so he could play with it.

7year old

7 year old

When the above artist told me he was finished, my first instinct was to tell him to smooth out the clay. However my immediate second thought was that this work was an amazing three dimensional interpretation of Cezanne...which of course was still forefront in my brain.

10 year old

8 year old

6 year old