Create Your Own Striped Christmas Cards

Today you’ll use the method you learned yesterday to make beautiful, handmade Christmas cards that your friends and family will love.

Supplies Needed:

Heavy Paper
Washable Paints
Paintbrush
Spray Bottle
Cookie Sheet
Tape
Pencil
Colored papers
Stamps
Markers
Glitter
Tape a sheet of heavy paper to your cookie sheet. Use your paint brush to dab blobs of red and green paint across the top of your paper.

Set your spray bottle to mist and sprits the paint with water until it runs down the page. I found that the red paint overpowered the green paint, so I added more dots of green and continued to spray.
Let your paper dry.

Now for the card making. I used blank note cards but you can use heavy paper, folded in half if you don’t have any blank note cards.

What you do next is completely up to you. Use your imagination to combine your materials and see what you come up with.
I began by tracing the shape of my note card onto my striped paper. I cut it out and then cut a window out of its center. I then cut a square of green construction paper and used a stamp to print a stocking in the middle. I sprinkled the stocking with glitter while it was still wet, then tapped off the extra. Finally, I glued all the pieces to the front cover of my note card.
If you have trouble cutting perfect straight lines out of the middle of paper, try cutting abstract shapes instead. Notice my green card with the snowflake and the Christmas tree.
If you’re careful with your striped paper, you can make five or more cards using the same sheet of paper.

Write your holiday wishes inside your cards, slide them into envelopes, and mail them to your friends and family. They will certainly smile at your thoughtfulness.

More Christmas card ideas to come next week. Check back tomorrow for Fantastic Fiction Friday.

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Create Your Own Morris Louis Stripe Painting

Morris Louis created his paintings a little differently, but you can create your own stripe paintings like his.

Supplies Needed:

Cookie Sheet
Heavy Paper
Washable Paints
Paintbrush
Spray Bottle
Tape
Paper Towels

This project is a lot of fun, but it can get messy. Make sure you cover your work space and have paper towels handy.

Use a small piece of tape to attach your paper to the cookie sheet.

Dab blobs of different colored paint in a line across the top of your paper. You don’t need a lot of paint to create stripes.

Set your spray bottle to a wide spray. Water should mist out of the bottle. Angle your bottle downward and spray the paint blobs until they begin to run. Continue to spray until most of the paint has run down the page.

Use a paper towel to catch the extra water. You may also want to use a paper towel to blot the bottom of your paper.

Voila! Your very own stripe painting!

Tomorrow I’ll show you how to use this technique to make fun, homemade Christmas cards.

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Morris Louis

Morris Louis was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1912. His name was Morris Louis Bernstein but he dropped the Bernstein in the late 1930s. He studied art at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts but he left school before finishing the program.

He went to New York in 1936. Louis helped with some workshops that helped artists use unusual tools, like spray guns, to create art. These workshops helped grow the Abstract Expressionist movement.

Louis didn’t stay in New York for long. In 1940 he moved back to Baltimore and began showing his work. A group of local artists liked his work and convinced him to teach them.

Louis moved to Washington, D.C. in 1952 and started teaching at the Washington Workshop Center of the Arts. He didn’t have many friends in the art world and didn’t travel much to learn about new styles of painting. While in D.C., Louis met artist Kenneth Noland. Noland took Louis to New York where he saw the work of many new artists. One artist, Helen Frankenthaler, really inspired Louis. This painting, Mountains and Sea, especially moved him. Frankenthaler had stained the canvas rather than just painting it. Louis would try this method when he returned to D.C.

Louis began a series of paintings that he called Veils. To create his Veils, Louis poured paint onto a canvas and then poured thin black paint over the colors. Check out this Veil painting.

When he had finished his Veil paintings, Louis didn’t know what to paint next. He wasn’t happy with anything he created and he destroyed about 300 paintings.

Finally, in 1960, Louis began painting another series, called Unfurleds. In these paintings, Louis painted stripes of bright color that began in the upper corners and met at the bottom center in a V-shape. This is a great example on an Unfurled painting.

Morris Louis created one more famous series of paintings, called Stripes. The Stripes paintings featured slightly overlapping stripes of bright colors that began part way down the canvas and ran off the bottom. Louis’ Stripe paintings are my favorites. Check out this one and this one.

Louis died in 1962.

Tomorrow: A Morris Louis project.

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Final NaNoWriMo Update 2008

Now that NaNoWriMo has ended, I want to tell you how I fared in this year's National Novel Writing Month. As you know, I reached 50,000 words on November 25th. Today, I finished the month at 60,040 words! And THE END were the final two! This year was very successful, mainly because there was a great group of other writers in my area who were also working on NaNovels. We helped each other a lot this month with support and encouragement.

In case you're interested, below is a graph that shows my progress throughout NaNoWriMo 2008 in comparision to last year. Can't wait to add a third line next year!

And now, on to December. May it be filled with art projects.

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Math Curse by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith

What is this? A bonus post? Hmmm.

Happy Saturday. Saturdays are reserved for those rare times when I want to say something that has nothing to do with art.

I want to recommend a great book by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith called Math Curse. A boy’s teacher, Mrs. Fibonacci, suggests that “you can think of almost everything as a math problem.” When the boy wakes up the next morning, math is all around him. It’s in his morning routine, it’s at lunch, it’s in social studies, English, and P.E. classes. The boy just can’t escape the math curse!

There are references to math concepts that students won’t learn until middle school or high school but they’re subtle. For instance, though the math teacher’s name is Mrs. Fibonacci, it doesn’t matter that a third grader wouldn’t know what the Fibonacci Sequence is. I think this would be a great book to read to upper-elementary-level math students on the first day of class.

There is another book in this series, Science Verse, that I do not recommend for young students. Unlike Math Curse, when reading Science Verse it is important to understand the upper-level science concepts to find enjoyment in the book. If you read Science Verse to elementary school students, you would have to spend a lot of time explaining ideas.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

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___________________________
My Current NaNoWriMo Word Count:

56140 / 60000 words. 94% done!
One more day to go!