"Red" Charles Grooms was born in 1937, in Nashville, Tennessee, and is a multi-media artist. His wonderful walk-in environments or "sculpto-pictoramas" have delighted young and old alike.
These wonderful environments are created out of wood, cardboard and plaster.

You'll need some larger boxes to make one of these sculptures. You can find such boxes at grocery stores, computer stores, furniture stores, or bicycle shops. You can use the lids of the boxes to cut smaller pieces for cars, people, and detail for the buildings.

This is a great project for a co-operative art experience for the whole family. The younger children can paint the windows and buildings. The older children can do the more refined items like cars, buses, street signs, people, and the greater detail of the buildings.

You will find that the project will change constantly during the creative process. Talk about distorting and exaggerating the parts of the sculpture by using unusual shapes, sizes, and colors.

Materials to use are large brushes, water-base paint, duct tape, scissors, Elmers glue, and boxes. This is a project for all ages.

The goals of this lens are to use the elements of art such as line, value, color, and to develop compositions that find a different point of view in creating the art experience. I will provide you with lessons that I or my colleagues have used with children, so I know they are successful.

We will explore drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, collage, mixed media, found art, weaving and computer art. On each lesson I will attempt to give you an age range for each project, and will substitute age appropriate tools when necessary.

I was a "process teacher" and not a "product teacher." If you have a great process, you will eventually get a great product. By using art history and other artists as examples, we will open the mind to unlimited creative possibilities.

Finally, I can give you guidelines on how to talk about the finished art project with your child. This was an opportunity to have an art exhibit with refreshments. We used to call this "a critique," but the reality was very little critiquing and whole lot of encouragement to create again.

In one of my other lenses for Stay-At-Home-Dads, I talked about a contour drawing and gave a lesson plan for it, you may want to refer to it. The lesson here takes the contour drawing to the next level because now you are drawing the inside and outside lines of the subject.

This lesson plan is geared for third grade and above. You will need paper, pens or markers. We used a student model but you can easily set up a few objects on a table and do this drawing.

This continuous cross-contour line drawing requires you to concentrate on the edges as well as the inside lines. Your eyes follow the edges of the objects and your pen records what you are seeing. You do not look at the paper. The drawings that you will get are wonderful and you may find that lots of practice will make you more confident. Trust me, and you will get beautiful line drawings.

The drawing above was done by my son, when he was in fifth grade, while a student in my classroom. Art was never his favorite subject, but I think this is a good example of what anyone can do with this process.

When we would critiqued these drawings, we would talk about the beautiful lines in the folds of the coat, the buttons, and the added details of the necklace and weeds in his hand. You can tell by this drawing that my son was really watching what he was doing, because you can see where the paper soaked up more of the marker as he paused while drawing.

Just have fun. Every drawing is a treasure.

This is a very fun and surprisingly beautiful lesson geared for children first through fifth grade. You will need 8"x10," (or smaller board if children are in first or second grade), oil pastels or crayons, black tempera paint or India ink, pen points, paper clips or any object that can be used to scratch lines. I used lots of photos of bugs and insects for creative inspiration.

The children can prepare the surface of the 8"x10" cardboard by covering it with multiple colors of crayons or oil pastels. See the illustration in this article for application of color. The more colors used in a compact area, the better the end result will be. I have also found that inexpensive student grade oil pastels are richer in color than crayons.

An adult may need to do this next step. Take black tempera paint or India ink, mix a couple of drops of liquid dish soap with it, for this will help to better cover the tempera and India ink surface. Take a soft brush and cover the entire prepared cardboard surface with the black. You will be covering up all the colors from the crayons or pastels.

While the black is drying, show photos of wonderful bugs and butterflies. Talk about their forms and legs. When the black has dried, use the paper clips, pens to scratch through the black and the beautiful color beneath will appear. By using different objects to scratch, you will get varied lines and shapes.

This lesson is easy to share and love.

"The arts are an essential element of education, just like reading, writing, and arithmetic...(The arts) are keys that unlock profound human understanding and accomplishment."
William Bennett, (former U.S. Secretary of Education)

I believe that art is a universal language that breaks barriers. It teaches us how to problem solve, to think through and with a material, to be creative and to teach that there may be more than one solution.

The arts help us define the values that are so dear to us and disclose our human concerns. It is a necessary part of communication. I hope you will enjoy this lens and it will help all who enjoy the arts.