(upbeat instrumental music) - Hello, early learners.

And welcome back to the art room.

It's going to be a little bit of a different day today.

I'm starting out with the project first.

It's a project that has many steps, and we need part of it to dry before we cut it out.

So I'm going to do the painting first, and then I'll read the story, and we'll talk about the print, and the artists.

But I gave you a hint yesterday, that today we were going back to revisit Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese artist who is still living today, and she's in her 90s, and still doing art.

But in order to get started, I wanted to show you, I'm going to be printing with bubble print.

Now, if that's something that you don't have this kind of bubble wrap that goes around a package, that's okay.

You can just make dots with the end of an eraser, but this is just really quick.

And I wanted to do pink on magenta paper, and then magenta on pink paper.

So I'm bringing down my magenta paper, and putting it on my workspace.

And I'm going to keep the bubble wrap right here.

I made my bubble wrap the exact size of my paper, because then it will cover the whole thing when I'm printing.

Now, I wanted you to know I'm going to mix some colors.

And when we talk about a tint, it's when you mix white with a little bit of another color.

So in order for the pink to show up on the magenta, I'm going to put mostly white, and then a little bit of magenta on here.

I hope this is the magenta.

It looked like magenta, and it said magenta, but it looks like red to me.

Put a tiny bit.

Now, I'm going to mix that with my brush, (brush mixing) and make it into a lighter color.

Because a tint mixed with white, you use the white first.

When you make a color tint, you must start with white.

That's the hint.

So here's my pink.

And I'm going to use my brush, and paint it all over the side that is the bumps that are on there.

So I'm going to paint it like this.

I also brought these great foam brushes because they really get the paint on there quickly.

(paint brushing) Here we go.

I might have to make more paint 'cause it's getting in between all of the dots, and getting in between there, I have to paint it all the way to the edge.

All the way.

And you'll see, this is the reason that we're doing this first is so that when I put this print on there, it'll have time to dry.

Because when you go to cut out something that has paint on it, and it gets all over things, it makes it so the art is not very fun anymore because it makes a mess, and you think, "Oh, this is too messy.

My family won't let me paint again if I do that."

I'm keeping it away from my furniture because I'm sitting in this really nice chair that has fabric on it.

And it's not just something you can wipe off like a wooden chair would.

I'm almost done here.

I have to do it kind of quickly before the paint dries, even though on plastic, it doesn't dry as quickly as it does on paper or something like that.

I think I got pretty much all around the edge.

So now I'll show you as I move this out of the way, and I will put my paper down.

Maybe I can just put it on top of here.

Line it up and iron it with a smooth hand.

(paper pressing) Up and down.

Side-to-side.

And let's see if it made the polka dots.

(paper peeling) Well, it sure did.

You can see one place I didn't really press very well, but that's okay.

I'm gonna set it over here to dry, and print my second piece.

And I'm going to do magenta on a pink piece of paper because I'm going to be making these flowers like Yayoi did.

And when I show you the print, you're gonna say, "Hey, no wonder she did it like that."

So I'm gonna use my same palette so I don't waste too many paper plates, and I'll put the paint on here, and I'll use my brush to paint onto the bubble wrap again.

But this time it's going to be a darker color, not mixed with white.

(paint brushing) Now, if you don't have any paints, remember what I told you, you could just make dots or if you have sticky dots, you could make a whole paper covered with different colors of dots.

Because all of this week, we're gonna be talking about the Dot Day, International Dot Day.

And I explained to you why we did that, because Peter H. Reynolds wrote the book, "The Dot."

And a teacher decided to do a big celebration.

And then more teachers thought, "Hey, that celebration looks fun."

And teachers send their artwork, and they'd have a big art show, and they let their children's artwork be shown around.

And it could be just a dot, where it could be any kind of artwork that tells people you believe you are creative.

Because yesterday when we read "The Dot."

Book.

We found out that Vashti did not think she could draw.

And she stabbed her paper with a pen, and only made a dot on there.

And do you remember what her teacher said to her?

Did her teacher say, "That's not right."

No.

She said, "Sign it."

So Vashti signed it.

And then Vashti did just what her teacher did to the little boy who didn't think he could drew a straight line.

All right.

Now, I'll move this paint out of the way, and put this pink paper on top, and iron it again.

(paper pressing) I don't wanna press too hard, and get all the paint I got in between the dots.

But I don't want that one big long stripe of no paint at all.

So I'm gonna go across one way and then the next.

Now, we're going to be making a flower that is pink with, (paper peeling) magenta polka dots, and magenta with pink polka dots.

But we also are going to need some leaves.

Now, see this paint that's on here so it doesn't get on anything?

I'll folded in half.

(instructor coughs) Excuse me, boys and girls.

And move it over to the side.

Because now I'm going to do the leaves, and I'm going to get this little brush, and make some green paint.

And I brought two colors of green for leaves.

I brought a dark green piece of paper, and I brought a light green piece of paper.

And I have a little piece of bubble wrap that will go on top of those.

So let's mix up some colors.

And same as before, if you're going to do a light color or a mixture, start with your light color first.

So I'm using yellow and green, and then I'll just use straight green on the light green.

So let me mix green, and yellow to make it kind of a lemony green.

I'll mix it with my sponge paint brush.

'Cause that's the one I'm going to paint my bubble wrap with.

Good.

It's all mixed up nice and smooth.

Move that over.

Feel which side has the bubbles.

It's this side.

And I paint it across.

(paint brushing) Paint it across.

Some of this bubble wrap.

This was wrapping up something small.

And when I ripped it open, I realized I stretched the dots, but it's okay.

I think it'll still look good on my leaves.

Paint it all the way so that it will fit on this paper.

I'm putting the light green on the dark green paper, put it on and smooth it.

(paper pressing) I hope it looks like dots.

(paper peeling) Oh, and it does.

Some of them are mixed together, but that's okay, it'll still look good.

Set it aside to dry.

And now I want to do a dark green, and I'm not going to mix it up, and put it over here.

Get just a clean brush, dip it in.

And I think if I wipe off some of this, it won't have so much light green, and I have a pie pan that I've got so that I could wipe my hands off, but I'm gonna wipe off some of this paint.

So the dark green will stick.

Set this aside.

I'm gonna dry that out a little bit on my background paper, (paper rustling) and get ready to paint the dark green.

(paint brushing) Dark green.

Oh, that one you can really see when it goes on the dot.

So I can tell where I haven't gotten any paint, and be sure to get the paint in that area.

(paint brushing) How many of you have ever seen things wrapped in bubble paper?

A lot of people like to pop them 'cause it makes a satisfying sound, and they go, "Oh, give me that bubble paper.

I wanna pop the bubbles."

But I save all of mine for art, 'cause there's lots of times I want to make some polka dots on some paper.

There we go.

And there is my second one.

Great.

Set it aside to dry.

And now, I can tell you the story of Yayoi Kusama.

Set everything over, and the bubble wrap gets folded once, and set aside with all the paints.

Get some of this paint off my fingers so I don't get it on to the book.

I'll have to dry off here 'cause I don't know where I put my paper towels.

Oh, I always could wipe it on my apron 'cause that's what it's there for.

Okay.

Here we go.

(hands rubbing) Well, let me set this here.

Lean it so it doesn't get any paint on the chair, and pick up my book.

Yayoi Kusama.

Yayoi Kusama is the artist from Japan.

And we studied her when we talked about pumpkin's last year at this time.

I'm going to read part of the book today, and tomorrow we're going to study her as well, and make a giant flower like she did, but I'll read part of the book then.

And this just tells you, I'm going to leave out parts of the book.

So if you have this book, don't think that my words are missing.

I'm just telling you the high points.

But this is Yayoi Kusama, was born in the country of Japan, on an island called, and she was born in Matsumoto City.

Her parents owned nurseries where all kinds of flowers and vegetables grow, and workers tended the plants as they matured from little seeds to sprouts to stocks.

But Yayoi, she yearn or that means she really, really wanted a different life far from the countryside.

She dreamed about what laid beyond the mountains in places, far from Matsumoto City.

And she longed to leave home, and go see the world.

Now they did the art on this to make you notice that everything she saw, she saw kind of as dots.

Now, her mother wanted her to stay home, and learn old-fashioned manners.

How to dress elegantly, that means fancy.

Walk like a lady.

Eat politely.

And find a husband.

But she wanted to be an artist.

And every day she went outside with her ink, and brushes and paper, and she drew things she saw, and things that she imagined.

And she looked closely at the pebbles that lined the river bed.

And she looked at leaves and stocks of plants.

And she drew them as chains of tiny cells that look like dots.

And that's why people called her the princess of polka dots because that's what she did.

She did everything that looked like polka dots.

And when she was older, and went off to art school, her teachers did not like her work.

They said that she needed to paint like traditional people did, like Japanese people did.

And she wanted to go where she could live without all those rules.

Now, when she was 28 years old, she packed up all of her silk kimonos, and thousands of drawings, and stuff dollar bills into the toes of her shoes, and got on an airplane.

It was her first airplane trip.

And there were only four other people on the plane.

And the weather was storming, and there was lightning and rain, and the airplane was wobbling and dipping as she flew to America.

(page flipping) Look what she sees from high up.

What do you think she thinks those look like?

That's right.

She thinks they look like polka dots.

In New York city, she stood up there and saw all the cars, and the people, and thought they looked like dots.

She thought, "Oh, I'm far from Matsumoto City."

And she started in her studio making art that looked like this.

And she was painting mostly in black and white.

And she made sculptures that she put on chairs that looked like stuffed little worms, and it looked like caterpillars all over there.

She was devoted to her dots.

Everything had dots on it.

And she was poor, and used up all the money that she have had in her shoes.

But when she went to the museum, she thought, "My art does not look like this."

She saw van Gogh's "Starry Night."

And Matisse "Dancing People."

She thought, "Oh, my art does not look like this."

(page turning) But she went back, and had seen what she saw at the Modern Museum of Art.

And when she was ready to show her work, she invited all the friends she had made at New York.

But once she got to the gallery, people were spilling out of the gallery, and her friends lifted her into the air, and said, "Yayoi, you finally done it!"

Word about her artwork spread quickly.

Her friends told their friends, and newspapers wrote about her work, and reporters clamored over to interview her about the dots.

And now she began to show them in other cities, and all over Europe.

Let's put this away for now, and look at the print that we're going to be using as our inspiration today.

Now let me turn over to the poster.

Look at this.

We know that when Yayoi was doing her art, she did this web behind her art, and she called it the infinity web.

Because it just, she made little diamond shapes, parallelograms and did her art first in front, and then drew that behind, and made her work look like that.

Here is the pumpkin that she drew.

And the one that was the sculpture, tomorrow I will show you how it got washed off into the ocean.

And here is Yayoi, a picture of herself.

She's dressed in dots.

She always has that bright hair, and she's sitting in front of her pumpkin.

but this is the one I thought we could do today.

I made the pink and magenta petals of the flower, and we can make that in the center, but watch what we're going to do, and we'll use our greens to make the leaves.

So let me get my table back up on my lap.

I hope that we can make this without getting the paint.

'Cause I don't think it's completely dry, but it's okay.

I'll get my black paper as my background.

What I'm going to do to make the infinity web is on black, if you have a white pencil or you can use anything you'd like, you just draw little shapes around the back behind your art and you can just connect them.

We did this when we did our pumpkin art, if some of you remember from that.

But I start this with my infinity web.

Let's start cutting out our flower petals.

Now, each one can be a different shape, but I'm gonna cut a couple of them the same shape.

And I even brought some fancy scissors to make my leaves have crinkly edges.

Get my glue stick over here, set this up, and my crinkly scissors, set this up.

I am going to cut strips so that I know how much paper I still have to make my flowers.

So if I make this many, and just make them a leaf shape, which is a curved, I just curve up to the top, and I just curve down to the bottom.

I have just made four petals, and I'm going to do it in a pattern.

So I'll do flower, flower.

Flower, dark, light, dark, light, dark, light.

I think I probably need three more.

And I think boys and girls, for the size paper I have, maybe I need to make my petals a little smaller.

You'll see how I do it.

I just cut a little bit off of it.

I think that's gonna be a better size.

Uh-hmm.

That's the nice thing about an artist.

You can do arrange and rearrange, arrange and rearrange, putting all my points to the middle.

Again, I'm going to do a strip, (paper cutting) on my dotty paper.

I'll fold it in half long-wise, fold it, and cut it into like a leaf shape or a petal shape.

(paper cutting) There we go.

And I'm ready to glue these on.

And just like we talk about when we're gluing things, we wanna make sure we get all the way around the edges.

So let me move these scraps out of the way so they're not bothersome.

And a neat area makes your artwork much easier to do.

So I turn it over to the blank side, and put the glue on that side, and I'm going to put one here.

You can arrange and rearrange.

You saw me try it.

And I thought, "Oh, it looks good up here."

And one here.

Remember I told you I'm doing a pattern?

(paper cutting) And even if my petals go off the paper, that's okay.

Kind of like Georgia O'Keeffe used to do, have her artwork go off the page.

I'm doing it.

Magenta, pink, magenta, pink, magenta, pink.

(paper rustling) Oh, Yayoi Kusama.

If you remember the song about her it went, ♪ Yayoi ♪ ♪ Yayoi Kusama ♪ ♪ The princess of polka dots ♪ I need to put this one, and glue this center on there.

I think that little feather part needs to go in there, and then comes the pink one.

(paper gluing) Even if you didn't print yours, you always can make a flower just by cutting out plain paper, and not even have polka dots on it, and just remember that we did it thinking about Yayoi.

There's my flower beginning.

And I think, I will cut out a scrap as my center and I'll do it plain, and not have the polka dot there, and I can draw it on rather than a printed piece.

If I cut off the squares, and use my black outliner, I think that would look good.

So I'm gonna go around the outside.

You know a lot of flowers have those little black seeds in the middle.

So I think I'll make little black polka dots in the middle of my round circle for my flowers center.

Oh, uh-hmm.

I like how that looks.

And I've told you before when it's something small, I often just put it on the glue stick like that, put it in the center.

Ah-hah!

Do you see?

That's off to a good start.

Now I'm going to get my green.

I think I'll use the light green as the stem, and where is a good piece?

Oh, here's one that's really good.

Has some good dots all the way.

And so I'm gonna cut out a stem, (paper cutting) see how that fits in there.

And maybe this one isn't glued down completely.

Nope.

And I can just shove it up in there, and you see when it's hanging off the edge, what I'll do.

I show you this all the time my little trick about how to make things fit on my paper.

So I'll put it up in there, glue it down.

But then whatever's hanging off the back of my paper, I just snip it off, and there is my stem.

But now it needs some leaves around the edge.

And I might use some of this green, but I think I will use the dark green with the light green polka dots.

And I'm going to do a strip just like I did with the petals, (paper cutting) like this.

(paper cutting) And I'll stack these two up.

That one has quite a bit of wet paint still on it.

So I'm gonna do it like this.

And I have these scissors that have zigzags on the edge.

So I'm going to cut just the way I did the petals of the flowers, (paper cutting) and do this.

If you don't have these zigzag scissors, you can get them, a lot of times they sell 'em at the craft store.

Or I even saw them one time at that store where everything's a dollar or you can just go zig zag, zig zag on the edge of yours.

I'm turning them over so the paint is face down so I can put the glue stick on here, and I'll put it next to the stem, and it might even go over one of the petals.

And this one, I'll have it go over here too.

Okay.

Here is my flower.

Now, I just need to do the infinity web.

And infinity means it goes on forever, but I don't think I will take forever to do my infinity web.

Move all these scraps over so I don't get anything my painting.

Now.

So here it is.

Let me move the scissors.

And I'm going to do infinity web.

And you can just, this is just something you don't even have to think about.

You go over, over, up, connect.

Up, over.

It doesn't even have to be the same shape as the one next to it.

It's just to make the infinity web, and you can just take your time.

And this is something you can go away, and come back to another time.

You can just make it to be triangles or other shapes.

Go into your petals, and don't draw on the flower itself.

Just go down, connect.

And you can see that my white lines are showing 'cause I'm using a white on a black paper.

So it depends on what your background paper is if this will work out for you.

Just see at what you think.

And if you don't love the infinity web, just leave your painting or your drawing just like that plain in the background.

You can decide what sounds good to you.

Boys and girls, can I tell you about what I want you to bring tomorrow?

Tomorrow, we're doing a painting of Yayoi called, "Eyes Flying in the Sky.

So if you can bring a white paper plate tomorrow, some colored markers, I'm bringing a black permanent marker.

And I might even have some dotted background paper that I've made, and we will do "Eyes Flying in the Sky."

But really we're going to do another flower.

Boys and girls, I'm glad you came today to learn about Yayoi Kusama's flowers that she painted in 2004.

And we did the infinity web, and heard a little bit about her.

Glad to have you here today.

See you next time, boys and girls.

Good-bye.

See you next time, everyone.

Good-bye.

See you next time, everyone.

Good-bye to you.

Good-bye to you.

Good-bye to me.

(upbeat instrumental music)