polymer clay Fimo Castles

This is Katie's castle. I think Katie just finished kindergarten. We all worked together to make a "stone quarry". We mixed silver/gray, white and black clay into little stones. Since all the students make slightly different stones, the combined effect looks really neat. I mixed up the stones and redistributed them. To save clay I gave each student a tin foil cylinder for the center of the castle. The students were sooo excited to get their castles back. I even had one student tell me she could sleep because she was so excited!

Fimo Penguins

When I was little, we had a family friend from Germany who taught all the kids to make things out of fimo. As far as I know, polymer clay wasn't available in craft stores at the time. At any rate, I know she ordered her clay from Germany. My first fimo instruction books were also written in German (I just looked at the pictures). For years, fimo was my favorite pastime. We didn't have fimo soft, so I spent hours conditioning what seemed to me to be impossibly hard clay. It was also very expensive for me so I made things tiny and did everything possible to conserve clay. I never imagined it would become a big part of my work when I grew up. I love passing on the joy that I was given!


I have a FANTASTIC group of students over at Casas Christian School this summer. These are their penguins.

Ship at Night Drawing Lesson

OK, I've been posting projects to be read from bottom to top, but now I'll switch back to top to bottom like normal. This project is always a hit with any age. Students add sharks, nets, crow's nests, pirates, portholes, and so many other things! I like to play the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack while we draw. This project teaches overlapping shapes, horizon line, reflections or mirror image, and most importantly imagination. For younger students, the sails don't have to overlap, or they can draw fewer sails. Practice with overlapping shapes is a good warm up. Point out that we know which shapes are "in front" even though we only have a two dimensional surface.

In this picture the horizon line is where the water meets the night sky. The horizon line should be drawn anywhere as long as it is at least slightly above the bottom of the boat. Place an object (ideally and model ship) on the table and have the students look at it from a standing and then kneeling position. Point out how the line at the far end of the table rises and sinks in relation to the object.

Most students will want to draw yellow, five-pointed stars. That's OK of course, but you can show then how natural stars look. Prismacolor pencils on black paper work so well! Ask them if the top or bottom of this demo looks best and why.

How to Draw Sea Turtles

This Sea Turtle was drawn with pen and ink (fine point sharpie) on watercolor paper and then painted with watercolor. The students can practice making patterns and textures with the black lines.


I love Sea Turtles! This morning I had a class of four-year-olds and they were able to manage the basic outline. This is a great project for smearing oil pastels. The oil pastels are applied thickly in stripes. Then we use a pencil eraser to blend the stripes perpendicularly. Let me know if you want me to post pictures of the process. The top one is by Cyan, the bottom one is by Becca.