Good things come to those who wait

We are coming to the end of the art classes. *sniff & sigh*  It took little bits of 2 weeks to get ready for, and all our self control waiting for, our SCRATCH ART DAY!!!!  I thought about just having the blank scratch art sheet prepared for them myself, but decided there was some value in their learning about the process and understanding that lots of art takes time and patience to create.  So one week, after our main project was done, we colored our cardstock with oil pastels. Then one week, while we were already messy with paints, we painted over the colors with black paint that had been mixed with equal parts liquid dish washing soap. (you can see another time we did scratch art in this post, but our 1/2 soap & 1/2 paint worked better than last time's ratio.)

Our friends had been studying ancient India so I thought it would be a perfect match to talk about repeating patterns since scratch art lends itself to patterns, and Indian folk art is full of crazy, beautiful patterns, EVERYWHERE. (Incidentally, it was kind of tricky to find art from India because every Google search or library search for "Indian Art" gave me a bevy of info/images for Native American Art. There was only one book in our entire library about Indian Art History and only one book illustrated by an Indian America. A bit sad I think.)  Luckily I found Bharti Dayal's works online and absolutely fell in LOVE!!!  She is a contemporary Indian artist who gets her inspiration from old Hindu folk art; such gorgeous shapes and patterns!  Here are some of my favorites. . .

 and she just looks like a person that I'd love to be friends with too!!

Anywho, everyone had fun with it and some of them really caught on the pattern idea.

J was an exception; everything he draws is a technical diagram for some kind of space ship, weapon, or booby trap involving dynamite.

Here are some the utinsels we tried using to make different sized lines: a fork to make a series of paralell lines, the side of a spoon to make thick lines. a bamboo skewer for medium lines and toothpick for fine lines.

So much fun!  I doodled here and there on my for days!