home school & honeybees

Before 10 am this morning, I never would have linked those two things together. Home school and honeybees made for an entertaining artsy day.


I recently started helping out with home schooling a very smart little boy. We've been doing his normal school routine then an art lesson after. Today we were going to finish up making his journal, then start a screen printing project. But his mom had a bunch of frames from bee keeping boxes that she wanted us to make a wall pieces out of. Busy day ahead!


But first...the book! We used a technique I figured out during my collage classes with Arts Outreach. We cut out the large panel of a paper bag and used that as our canvas as we drew pictures and just got messy putting oil pastels and baby oil on the bag. When it dries, and is coated with a layer of varnish, the paper has kind of a leathery look to it! We bound it up using a coptic stitch, with some caterpillar stitches across the covers. He loves it! 

 

 
 














































Once the book was done, and the screen was drying, it was time to play with the frames! We started nailing pairs together then slowly started building the larger piece and checking it's balance on the wall. It turned out pretty awesome...

 

These frames were so neat and fun to play around with. There were even some old wax remains left in the crevasses which was surprising since the mom said these were about 40 years old. When we were all done, it was time to take some photos of the honey bees lurking about in the bushes nearby. Quite the bee filled day of home schooling adventures!