Published Article, Colored Pencil Flowers and My Latest Creative Project

Great news! I have been published in the Summer issue of School Arts magazine.
I wrote an article about artwork my students made after learning about the art of contemporary artist Justin Vining.  You can read the article here.  I wrote a blog post last year all about this project:  Inspired by Artist Justin Vining.

I love Justin’s artwork and you can see pictures of his artwork on his website.

School's out for summer!  For those of you who don't know, I teach K-6 art full-time during the school year.  Most of my blogging energy gets put into my teaching blog, Art is Basic.

A colored pencil flower drawing I recently made.

It's interesting how the coloring book craze has taken over.  If you walk into a craft store or Barnes and Noble, you will see a big display of them.  I even saw some adult coloring books at a gas station.  People have asked if I have gotten into coloring books, but I usually just like to draw my own pages, like the one above.

I have been working on a new creative project, which is not watercolor, not collage and not drawing!  What is it?  A planner for club or scout leaders!  So my plan is to create all the pages of this special planner and then get it printed for myself to use.  Also, I will put the files as a bundle in my shop so if anyone else wants to purchase a download, they can do so.  I'm also thinking of getting a bunch of them printed and then selling actual physical planners from my two online shops:  Teachers Pay Teachers and Etsy.

So what will make these planners special?  Well, the purpose of them is for club or scout leaders.  After my first year of leading a Girl Scout troop, I realized that using my personal calendar, plus the online tools were making it very confusing.  I decided that for next year I needed one paper planner that was only for Girl Scouts. Can you believe I couldn't find any physical bound planners for Girl Scout leaders?  I asked in a Girl Scouts Facebook group and people used teacher planners, but covered up the headings with stickers and re-purposed pages.  I was thinking how it would be really useful to have a planner that has the calendar pages, but also pages for attendance rosters, contact information of members, badges or awards earned, meeting agendas, future ideas and so forth.  My intentions are not to make it specific to Girl Scouts (there are copyright issues with that anyways) but general enough for leaders of other clubs to use as well (like a church scouting group or Student Council). 

The digital clip art I have gotten from commercial use websites such as Pixabay.com or Creative Market.  Some of the digital art I alter with color, cropping, rotating, etc. I think the pages are pretty cute.  I still have several hours of playing around with the other pages before I'm ready to send them off to the printers.  I am making the calendar pages from June 2016 through all of 2018, so the planner would be good for 2 years.  What do you think so far? Any suggestions or tips for printing?  Any pages you think I need to include in a club leader planner?

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