Students at the Emeryville campus love to paint, from the tempera colors we introduce in the Infant Community to the watercolor and acrylics used by the Children's House and Elementary. When a Montessori colleague suggested that small paintings might be an ideal gift for our students to give their parents, we were all immediately excited.
Our first step was to set a stage in our own minds for our work. We are only days away from the longest night of the year, and so we primed our canvases with Mars Black. This would make the colors we added later shine like jewels in the night.
Some of the children wanted to create a smooth, even surface; others were more interested in a thick
impasto and experimenting with different brush strokes.
When the canvases were dry, it was time to add our colors. We selected a deep forest green, red, white, gold, and copper for the holiday project. The children discovered that, adding the metallic gold or copper to the white, red, or green added iridescence along with a shift in color. Word spread quickly after a first student's lucky accident that blending red and copper with a little white made a luminescent rose hue that many of the students wanted to try to replicate.
Christmas trees (both indoor and outdoor) were a popular theme, but we were surprised to hear some of the stories the children told us about their paintings. One boy described the sea lions he saw on the beach on a trip with his parents down the coast; another child pointed to an abstract swirl of copper in a white corner and said her grandfather was making "snow angels" for her underneath the trees.
Now that our canvases our dry, we are ready to wrap them.
The children are so proud of what they have created, and so excited to
present their parents with these gifts, that it has been difficult to
convince them that we must wait until Friday!
