Laurel's Portfolio

Well the time has come to do my final post on my free inquiry on finding passion in painting! Over the semester I have explored watercolour and acrylic painting. A major theme that emerged is my love of mountains and trees, I have been painting and sketching them all throughout the semester!

So to go a bit off book, I went to a paint splatter evening with some friends at Four Cats at Uptown. We all did an individual canvas. Here is mine:

Once we had all completed our individual canvases, we did a group canvas which is here:

It was a lot of fun and I definitely found some fun and enjoyment from the painting activity! If you know someone who is not super keen on painting I would highly recommend a paint splatter night.

Overall, I have really appreciated having the opportunity to explore and try out an activity of my choice. It is not often that University courses allow for the freedom in choosing how you go about learning, so this was very much appreciated!

It has been a few weeks since I have updated my blog on my painting. Over Reading Break (Nov12,13) I managed to get in some painting while I was (metaphorically) under a mountain of schoolwork. In our Teaching Art Course we had been working on colours and blending colours, so I decided to try and create a sunset painting. As has been my theme over the semester, I stuck with mountains and added in a body of water.

What I should have done first was watch this video on how to blend acrylic paints together:

Since that is not really my style, I have found this video to use in the future when I attempt another sunset painting again! Live and learn, am I right?

I had a lot of fun doing this painting but something I definitely need to continue to work on is being patient when I am painting. I was taking my time for the top half of the painting and then I rushed through the reflection portion of the painting. In the future I would like to work on taking a break, then coming back to the painting rather than rushing to get it done!

Here is the final product:

Today in class we were shown a way to introduce coding to the classroom without using a computer. This could be a fun way to explain code in a physical and concrete way, before taking it onto an actual computer

There are lesson plans, activities and explanations on here.  This would be a great way to integrate coding and math!

https://csunplugged.org/en/

Here are 3 apps that were recommended to make digital storytelling fun beyond the usual ones!

• Comic Life
  • Create visually appealing comics
• Imagine Forest- free
  • Includes writing prompts, visual aids, and technical support
• Speech Journal- $3.99
  • Take photos, talk about experiences, more formal and personalized writing

Photo by Helloquence on Unsplash

Magical!

Video conferencing, robot in classroom. Way for all to access the learning.

Typically, if you’re there you benefit, if you aren’t then too bad. This is a way to give people the access they need and remove the barriers (physical or not) keeping them from attending a class. 

Should not mean that you are not communicating with the learners, still need that “face to face” interaction time. 

Information stays with you for the rest of you life, generally tends to be more accessible over time. 

Allows students to learn from instructors they would never be able to access in person- massive online course. *Anyone can enroll with no costs*

Traditionally classes have been face to face OR online. Now we are trying to have more of a blended class. Give students more information online so that you can get more productivity out of the face to face time. 

Multi-access, where students can access the class in person or online. When a classmate used the robot to attend class from Vancouver, they were given a way to access the class that was not in person. 

Takeaway: Be flexible in how our students attend classes, support them with their needs so that they can get the most access and learning from their classes. If a student will learn better from home, from a different environment than the classroom, why force them into the square classroom where their learning is not at its greatest potential. Why have a student ferry and drive multiple hours of the week to sit in a desk when they have a desk at home?

This evening, I decided to take a break from preparing for a test tomorrow by quickly splashing some paints on paper. I used some old paper from my notebook since I wasn’t planning on putting a lot of time and thought into the painting.

I enjoyed playing with the texture of the paint for the leaves in this one:

This one was not nearly as exciting but I did blend some blues, greens, and greys to make the colours in it:

Lately I have been a bit infatuated with sketching trees and mountains, so I decided to do some drawings of them and add in some watercolours. Here is what I ended up with:

The colours I added messed up my tree lines a bit but I had a lot of fun blending the green with the blue!

I decided to not paint this one, as I felt the colours would take away from the fine detail I put into the sketch.

This one was a bit off a mess up but I was playing with blending the colours to create a grey sea day.