School holiday mosaics 10 steps towards success.

Every school  holidays I run mosaic and painting workshops for students. We have a great time making creative creatures.
Here are some tips about becoming a top mosaic maker...

Find a  qualified, experienced  mosaic teacher in your area or find out if a teacher will travel to you.

Teachers can accelerate your learning and stop you from making ghastly and costly mistakes.
There is  a lot more to making an attractive, long lasting mosaic than people realise.
 Teachers have valuable techniques to share with you  that you won't even read about in books.

 Here is a visual  taste of what it's like to create you own mosaic.

Step One
 Cut out your shape with a jigsaw and prepare it properly.
You can do any shape, butterflies, cats, crosses, hearts, dinosaurs, birds, seahorses and even hippos; the sky and the power of your imagination is the limit.


Certain shapes are better than others and a teacher can advise you on the best things to make and how to cut them out. 




 Step Two
Use the  right type of cutters for the right kind of tiles.
You will need to to cut them correctly so that your hand doesn't end up being too exhausted.
You need to place tiles evenly and neatly using lots of good quality glue.

Step 3.

Tiles have to be placed on the right way up, there are special glues used for mirror which will stop the silver from being corroded.

Step 4.
You need to make decisions quickly; making a mosaic takes lots of time and attention to detail. 

Step  5. 
Think about line and contrast;  these are the most important elements of design that make up a successful mosaic.

Step 6
Take  rests; about five minutes every thirty minutes.

 Step 7
Step back from your work and admire it, creativity is as much about the enjoyment of the process as the end result.

Step 8
Grout your mosaic.
You have to use the right type of grout for the right situation.
You need to know the right consistency of the grout so it's not too wet and not too dry.
You must take safety precautions while applying grout.

 Step 9.
 Finishing off is everything.
Make sure you have put the grout into every available gap and you need to find out what special type of fail safe, cleaning solution is best for the job to make your mosaics look like gleaming gems. 

Step 9.
 Paint the back and sides of your mosaic.
You want the mosaic to last the distance and not fall off after the first burst of rain.

Step 10.

Polish, clean and grout protect your mosaic.
it's  time to show your results

 Enjoy your mosaics, they are your very own creations and you deserve to be proud of  them.

Mosaics can look great in the garden  or inside.

 

Pavers and all types of other substrates can be made into mosaics but you have to know which are the best ones and what sorts of glues to use.

When your mother comes to collect you after having a great time, you will be tired but happy.
Don't be surprised if your friends want to come to  mosaic classes as well  when they see what you have made.

  You too could make a happy Hippo

With a bird on it's back

Parents can come along with you as well and make their own mosaic.

 like this mosaic mirror with the mermaid and dolphin.

It's all about having fun and being creative in a warm,  happy studio setting in an organic cottage garden.

Mosaic making classes for the next school holidays are enrolling now.

Hurry to reserve your places, classes are small.

                  Janet Keen, ten years mosaic making and teaching experience, Diploma in Visual Arts.

Remember to enrol with a qualified and experienced instructor to make sure your mosaics last.


 Book your child or your group/family in for a half or full day workshop where they can make a fish, dog, heart, dinosaur, butterly, hippo , seahorse or any shape you desire.

Creativity Quotes of the day
"No matter how little money and how few possessions, you own, having a dog makes you rich."
-Louis Sabin

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
Maimonides

There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.
Carl Sandburg

Friend  me on facebook

Have a look at my website http://www.jkeen.net/

Ring Janet on 07 346343 or email jkeen@clear.net.nz in plenty of time for the next school holidays.

Mosaic Classes enrolling now for May.

Mosaic morning Classes.

Beginners guide to Mosaic making Part One and Two.  

Monday mornings from Monday 7th May 9.30 am to 12.00 noon

$200.00 per 4 week class including materials.

Mosaic  a pot, mirror and fish.

Tuesday Mornings from Tuesday 8th,  9.30 am to 12noon.

$200.00 including materials for 4 week class including materials.

Mosaic a paving stone with the theme of native birds.

Spaces limited to 8 people.

Once you have completed the beginners guide to mosaic making workshops 1 and 2, the sky is the limit. You can mosaic anything, even a life size seahorse.

374 Clayton Road, Rotorua.
Phone 346-3435 to reserve your place now. or email your enquiry jkeen@clear.net.nz

View mosaics in an organic garden and create in a positive, peaceful and friendly environment.

http://www.jkeen.net/


Creative Quotes of the day.
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.


Anais Nin

We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.


Jimmy Carter

Acrylic painting for beginners, last Vail family lesson on working with grid format.

Each person was asked to bring along collage materials to make a composition that was contained within panels of varying sizes within the  picture plane.
I love paintings like these because they allow you to put different and  interesting things together, just like a mosaic.
They are a visual narrative and often tell some very revealing stories about the person creating them. 

Heather chose vintage photos of people and themes from nature, to me it looks like a piece about journeys, overseas travel even travelling along roads  or maybe  even a movie. The most prominent design element here I  think is movement.


Rons was edgey with skeletons, images of war  and people from the middle east. This is what I would describe as a political protest piece. it is also telling a story.

This type of work is expressive, confronting  and can be cathartic to do and compelling to view.

Lalayna's cute, happy piece about the Samoid puppy  she would love to own.
This upbeat, decorative piece that would look good in any teenage girls room. Ron contributed the bone at the top of the piece which was a cute addition.
 She could use it as  a vision board in order to attract the  dog of her dreams. 
Visualise to materialise.

                    This is Julians creative, bold  take on the same subject; obviously if  Lalayna gets the puppy  she will be sharing it.
 I was very impressed with how well the family helped and encouraged each other and shared their ideas and resources. .
 It was smiles all around at the end of every lesson. .




They had a lot of fun expressing themselves and I really enjoyed teaching them.


Beginners acrylic painting  classes starting Mondays 7th May  from 6 to 8pm, enrolling now.
 Phone 346-3435 for details and class material lists.
Why not bring along your own family where people will get a chance to make some art for fun in a non -competitive, relaxed and colourful environment  set in an organic garden.

One of the great things about running classes from my studio is that I become friends with  the clients I teach and it's great to keep in contact with them after the classes are over.
 If families are too busy during the week I can arrange weekend worskhops.

Creative Quotes of the day
A family in harmony will prosper in everything.
CHINESE PROVERB


Check out my website at www.jkeen.net
Feel free to friend me on facebook.

 

Event Photography, Balloons over Waikato, New Zealand March 2012

Up goes the first balloon

 

And it's all about the logo's

Clash of the striped balloons

 This is supposed to be a crowd pleaser, why are you girls not smiling?

Best view of the whole event up here

And here

Yes it's all about the logo's and what exactly is Remax?

 

Everyone framed by balloons 

Inflated balloons and decapitated heads, is there a connection?

Head looking like it's inflating the balloon

 

And here comes the nose, bouncy, bouncy.

 

Joey and Mother Kangaroo following their noses towards a giant blue, striped balloon

That nose from another angle

Happy Joey's, Australia is well represented here. What a remarkable designer.

Still happy

Super happy, we have lift off

 Another Kangaroo being inflated, maybe it's the Dad, he has boxing gloves like a Dad

 

 Yes it definitley is a Dad Kangaroo looking at a balloon, too far away to punch.

Dad's leading the way, everyone's safe.

Then we have the Kiwi contender. Mr do-it-yourself painter bloke.  

First time out in public for this guy, completely computer designed.

     Don't know about the droopy beak.

 Maybe that's why he doesn't look as happy as the Aussies. 

   

It's farewell to all those lovely balloons, destined for some green field far away.

            Is the green one sinking or is it an optical illusion?

Further away until just about out of sight, only the people left, wistfully wishing they were going too.

Creativity quotes of the day

No-body can be uncheered by a balloon, Winnie the Pooh

Imagination is like a lofty building reared to meet the sky - fancy is a balloon that soars at the wind's will, Frank Gelett Burgess

Motion photography, taken at Rotorua lakefront for third assignment for Diploma in Digital Photography, Southern Institute of Technology.

Liked working with TV and with the camera on continuus shooting, trying to pan.

It looks like an Impressionist painting, don't you think?

This was on a windy day and the gulls loved being fed in mid air by this visitor

Flying in for the bread.

Coming in for landing

                                                                 Caught in mid flight

 Birds in motion.

                                                               At rest, motion shots over

I will be going back soon to the lakefront with my camera and tripod  I  will be asking more people from foreign lands to interact with the seagulls. It is my way of being free.

Gulls,  though over looked by many are quite beautiful creatures when you take the time to study  the texture of their feathers.  Visitors to  this country seem to appreciate them far more than New Zealanders do.
Just because something is common and always hungry, and scrappy, doesnt mean it shouldn't be appreciated.

Quotes from Jonathon Livingstone Seagull.
“How much more there is now to living! Instead of our drab slogging forth and back to the fishing boats, there’s reason to life! We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. We can be free! We can learn to fly!

““To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is,” he said,”you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived…”

10 reasons to take your 550D Canon SLR camera every day and keep on snapping.

The more you practise the better you get....

Acrylic Painting Class Lesson 5 Scraffitto and the Hundertwasser style, work on aluminium foil.

Heather Vail with her attractrive design, first she glued some aluminium foil on stetched canvas.

The family came to class with this already done because if you don't  do it a day ahead, the foil doesn't have time to dry and it can rip.

Ron Vail with his bird and fish.  Very dramatic.  Secondly they all painted their foil with black twice for good coverage.

Together we can achieve more with painiting as a family. 

Primary colours were used in the style of Hundertwasser.

 Bright,  happy primary colurs.

Hundertwasser was reputed to say that he had no use for the straight line.

Laleyna with her  funky cosmic looking creation.

After the design is done you scratch back some of the colours to reveal the aluminium underneath.

Hundertwasser, organic and curvilinear

Julian with his abstract creative design.

You are now finished and you can stand back and admire the bold bright design.

The whole family has work that goes together but shows each of their style.

In my courses no two people come out with the same design because I encourage you to express yourself.
The next Beginners Acrylic Painting class starts on  Monday the 30th of April , 6 to 8pm.
I am taking enrolments now.
 Classes limited to 8 people.

I am also running an advanced acrylic painting class  on Tuesday nights starting 25th April and I have one vacancy.
People work on their own designs and we work towards exhibition pieces.
They use my art books for inspiration. and we have in class critiques which help people grow in a positive and encouraging environment.

I will be featuring some of their work in the next post.


Past students are welcome to return for Beginners Painting Classes 2 where we will be working with plaster of paris, making acrylic skins, doing a coloured self portrait, working with wax, creating a landscape using glazing medium and aboriginal style pointilism work.

Group  enquiries welcome.
Weekend workshops by arrangement.

http://www.jkeen.net/
Join me on facebook.
 Phone 07 3463435 to enquire.

Creativity quotes of the day
Rejoice with your family in the beautiful land of life!  ~Albert Einstein


Family faces are magic mirrors.  Looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present, and future.  ~Gail Lumet Buckley

Doodling, why do it?

If you buy a hard back A6 visual Dairy and some crayons and coloured pencils plus fine tip black marker you can make something creative in a small amount of time and just because it's for your own amusement it should be fun.

Have a go if you are time poor.

Who can't spare half an hour while sitting in front of the tv?

It's portable,  take it to a cafe have a cup of coffee and do a doodle about coffee cups.

I'm planning to fill mine and on the facing page write some haiku.

I want to be a published writer but I only have time for haiku, writing on my blog, writing letters and writing lessons plans.

I bought some Crayola  Fun Effects Twistables Crayons last week. . 

 They come in a set of funky colours and you can draw over them with felts.

Plus some cheap Glitter paint a set of 12 candy colours from a one of those two dollar shops. 

 I want to try them out in my doodle diary and see what  I  can come up with.

Creative Quotes of the Day

Even if you can't draw, do a little doodle or rip an illustration from a magazine - these visuals will help bring your idea to life.
John Emmerling

I would recommend the short story form, which is a lot harder to write since you have to be so careful with words, until there is plenty of time to doodle through a novel.

Anne McCaffrey