♪ Good morning to a brand new day ♪ ♪ Time to learn and games to play ♪ ♪ Learning things is so much fun ♪ ♪ Learning is good for everyone ♪ (upbeat music) - Hello, early learners.

Welcome back to the art room.

It's me, Mrs. Readwright You know, we were doing 26 days of the ABCs of art, and today is letter X.

And letter X, it's hard to find things that start with an X.

We know xylophone does, but listen to the X.

Z.

So you usually will hear Xs, and your teacher will talk about X at the end of a word.

So we're talking about the word, relax.

relax.

Now the relax is on a park bench today, but first, let's make some noise.

And I think I will use this.

It has a gourd that used to be growing.

Here's where it attached to the plant and it grew out.

It kind of grows like a pumpkin does.

And if you have gourds growing in your yard, you can make an entire playhouse out of it.

We made one out of pipes and we grew the gourds over it, and the gourds hung below.

But listen, with all these little shells tied around it, listen to the sound it makes.

(gourd shaking) So I'm going to say, ♪ Let's make some noise ♪ ♪ We girls and boys ♪ ♪ We've got a voice ♪ ♪ So let's make some noise ♪ ♪ Let's make some noise ♪ ♪ We, girls and boys ♪ ♪ Hey, we've got a voice ♪ ♪ So, let's make some noise ♪ I'll put this aside and show you the ABC song.

Oh, let me say hi to these folks at Mrs. Nersesian's class, first.

We are saying hello to Marcos and Robert in Mrs. Nersesian's TK Class at Lawless Elementary.

Let me turn the page, because I have three more for tomorrow, and that will be her whole class.

Alrighty.

Here it is.

♪ A, B, C, D, E of art.

♪ ♪ That's the way that we will start ♪ ♪ U for umbrella ♪ ♪ Violin for V ♪ ♪ W for window, we can see ♪ ♪ X is for Xs.

♪ ♪ Y yarn squiggles for me ♪ ♪ Warhol, zebra ends the alphabet with Z ♪ And our person today is William Meritt Chase.

And people often looked at him and said, "Oh, look at his interesting mustache and beard."

He is an old fashioned artist.

And interesting thing about him was he started painting things in a park, like our park bench today, because he wanted people to get to know his art, and he wanted it to be in familiar places where they went.

So he thought, "Well if people see my paintings and they'd think, 'Oh I could be in that painting,' that they would buy them and he would be a famous artist."

And he became a famous artist.

Let's see the rhyme I made for him.

X is for relax.

See the Xs on the bench at the park.

Chase's painting shows some light and some dark.

And you can see all the dappling.

That means like little pieces of the leaves of the trees.

If you've ever been walking down a path at the park, or if you are going down a street and you see little patches of shadows and shade, you think, "Oh, that's dappling."

Or sometimes there's dappling on a pony's body.

It has dappling of other colors.

That's what he did with the park in the background, all those trees, and it's all different kinds of green.

So when we start to make ours, we're going to do the background by drawing a little hill, and then do some dapple painting in the background with a sponge.

And then I'm going to cut the seat of the bench, and then make the Xs so that you can have the X in the picture to go along with our letter today.

So let me pick up my little table.

I have so many things stretched out across the studio here.

I'm trying to get everything in order and keep it neat.

I don't think I need to keep my water up here, but maybe I'll do that right here.

I mixed up some colors in my pie pan that I'm going to use.

So let me put that here, and get my tan paper for the background.

Oh, that might be in the way of you seeing what I'm doing.

Let me move these colors and be ready to use those.

Stay there.

All right.

When I balance so many things on the paper, boys and girls, I tend to drop things.

I don't think I ever picked up my glue stick.

Maybe Miss Lara helped me.

I'm going to make a hill.

I'm gonna start up high and just go down a little bit, like that.

I'm still using his picture as my inspiration, so I'll bring it down here and look.

Here it is.

Here's the little hill, and I did my little hill.

I'll move this over here so I don't get paint on it, so I can see as I do my sponge painting.

I have my sponges and you know how I like to clip them in a little clip so I don't get it all over my hands.

And I'm going to dip in the green and the yellow and just do some leaf prints back here.

And you know, we've done this kind of painting before, and you don't rub with the sponge like you would if you were scrubbing your sink in your bathroom.

You would just print and up, print and up, up, up, up.

And I'm going along the hill.

And even though I touched the line in a couple places, I'm not getting it all mixed in there and going down where the bench is going to go.

I know that I'm painting some of this up here at the top with yellow, a little bit to blend in, so it looks kind of sunny.

I mixed some of my green in with some brown paint, so that it looks like a variety of kinds of leaves.

Because I don't know about you, but when I go to the park, I hardly ever see just one kind of tree.

There are lots of different kinds of trees, and it provides different kind of shade.

Because even some of the time you go to the park and they haven't planted any evergreen trees and there's no leaves at all, and you think, "Oh my goodness, these leaves only come out when it is a different season."

Here's my background.

Okay.

I'm pretty happy about that.

I'm going to move my paints out of the way 'cause I don't think I'll need them any more right now.

Now this is the part I have to think about how I'm going to do the park bench.

I have some scraps from when I did the umbrella picture, so I think I'll just use it first and leave this nice piece of paper in case I need it.

Now, if I'm looking at the park bench and it's at an angle a little bit, I wanna see how big I need to make the bench.

And I'm going to make the seat part first.

And I've taught you before how I kind of picture things by using my finger and going like that.

If I'm more comfortable, I could just do this, and mark where I just drew with my fingers, 'cause I thought that size was good.

That's pretty good.

And when I look at this one, it's fat at this end and it goes skinnier at the other end.

So I'm going to do that.

Starting a little fatter at this end, and even though I drew a line, I'm going to do a little skinnier cut.

And I cut down there, and I dry fit it here to see if it's going to be good.

Hmm, I think I need to cut a little bit down this at an angle.

How does that look?

I think I like that.

I'm going to glue it so that I can see how big my X should be.

Now in order to make my X be the right size, I'm just going to cut some strips.

And that way, when I go to put it together, I can angle it how I think it looks best.

Now I'm going to cut little skinny logs.

I want them to be kind of the same size, although this is made totally from tree branches and tree trunks.

So I think it doesn't matter if it's kind of wiggly 'cause it has some knot holes or where branches were.

So I'm gonna cut a few of these so I can make the back, and some are gonna be thicker, because the part that they have for the legs has to be a little thicker.

So I'll have those.

And if I want to shade them in to make them look more realistic, I can do that even after I glue them on.

So let me put these and see if these are skinny enough for the X. Oh, they're not.

I'm gonna cut those completely in half.

I thought I had an idea of how skinny they would be, but they weren't.

So let me cut them in half.

You could do one at a time.

I'm just doing this, so I can speed it up a little bit 'cause I need to put the X here.

That X goes there, and that X goes there.

Mm-hmm.

But do you think these are the right length?

No, they look like daddy long legs.

So I don't want to do that, but I do want to glue it on and figure out how long I want to cut it.

So I'm going to put this one here, and make that stick there and I will put it down, and I can trim it off a little bit later too.

Oh, there's a good X.

So, I'll put the glue on the back and put the X there.

Oh, that's pretty good.

I'll make it about the same length.

There we go.

Now I'm going to put the standing up legs.

Put that one there, needs to be about that long.

And this one will go back here, and go up for the back rest.

Hmm.

Pretty good.

Pretty good, Miss Readwright.

If you think it's easier just to draw it all and not do cutting and pasting, you're probably right.

But I wanted to do cut and paste, so I'm trying this.

It may not look very realistic, but it will still look good enough for me.

Now, I'll put the top of the arm rest there.

So put the glue on it, and put it on here.

I have a lot more work to do on this.

I have to put more legs on it.

The back of the bench has to come across, and I think I'll make this a little skinnier.

Look how I'm making it kind of wiggly like a branch would be, and I'll put it along the back.

Mm-hmm.

That's gonna work out good for me.

Put that as the background.

Think maybe this bench has a little bit too pointy side here.

I'll cut that part off.

Put the leg on.

Put another branch over here for the leg.

Ooh, it's gonna be connected.

I'm sure the grownups that watch this are saying, "Oh my goodness, that doesn't look very much like a bench."

But you know what?

It looks pretty good to me.

I think, "Okay, this is all right with me."

Cut this.

Put it at the end of the bench.

It needs an arm rest.

Put that part on there.

And then I can just start adding more details to my work.

I might put some of the shaded part on here.

I'll have to draw some of the wooden parts and make sure that the X really looks like an X, and go across with that.

And then I can rub it in.

I'll put some ground around it.

Boys and girls, tomorrow we're gonna do something with Jackson Pollock, who is famous for his paint.

And it looks like some child just accidentally spilled paint all over his paintings.

But we're going to do it with some different ways of adding paint and background to it.

So tomorrow, if you bring some brown, black, and white paint, and it's something where you can drip paint on your painting.

This is definitely an outside project, boys and girls.

I think that you're going to like making it and making it a splattery paint.

And I'm bringing spoons and sticks, and I'm bringing a marble even to roll around in a box to add some, so it looks like yarn for the letter Y.

All right.

Let's say goodbye to one another.

♪ Oh, it's time to say goodbye to all my friends ♪ ♪ Oh, it's time to say goodbye to all my friends ♪ ♪ Oh, it's time to say goodbye ♪ ♪ Give a smile and wink your eye ♪ ♪ Oh, it's time to say goodbye to all my friends ♪ Thanks for joining me today.

See you tomorrow, boys and girls.

Bye-bye (upbeat music) ♪ Good morning to a brand new day ♪ ♪ Time to learn and games to play ♪ ♪ Learning things is so much fun ♪ ♪ Learning is good for everyone ♪ (upbeat music)