Winter Blast.

Everyone loves the sight of fleshly and snow the magic it creates. Teachers have tried to capture its special beauty in many different ways.

As I looked out the classroom window and saw the drab grayness and not the white beauty of winter, I tried to "see" snow in a new light. No folded paper cutout snowflakes for my students!

I like to develop assignments that introduce technical terms while giving the students opportunities to make individual decisions in choosing how to use mixed media.

The technical terminology I introduced was "cold colors," which necessitated a short lesson about the color wheel. The students were quickly able to name the hot colors, so the cold ones came by a process of elimination. We would develop an assignment using a limited palette of blue, green, purple, white and silver.

The students were given the following task with this motivational statement: "Pretend to open your eyes inside a tremendous snowstorm with the snow swirling around you." All of my students had walked home or played outside in mild snowfalls, so the imaginary vision was not totally outside their experiences. This was not a vision that could be captured with a camera.

Each student was given an 18" x 24" sheet of white cartridge paper. Although no suggestion was made to the position of the paper, most chose to use it horizontally. I explained that the students would build up three layers of color and drawing, one layer at a time. This layering aspect helped to create a three-dimensional effect.

For the first layer, the students would use oil pastels from our limited palette to create long flowing and swirling lines. I demonstrated that straight lines, short lines, crisscrossing lines and recognizable shapes like snowmen would not produce the same artistic feeling as curving and spiraling lines.

Using the tip and pressing hard created different lines than using the side of a small piece and pressing lightly. Students were encouraged to have the lines go at least to one edge of the paper. Some students chose to make many lines, whereas some chose to make only a few. Some chose to use a variety of colors while many chose to use only white.

Still using pastels, students were shown how to draw a snowflake using three intersecting lines and repeating simple shapes such as short lines, circles and triangles on each of the six spokes. Those with the best results did this part of the work with care, making only a few flakes and pressing heavily.

Layer two used a tissue dye technique. Tissue dye work can be done in two ways for quite different effects. The first way is to wet the paper with water and apply scraps of roughly torn tissue paper over the wet spots. The second method is to place the scraps of torn tissue on the background and paint over them with a water-filled brush. It is useful to have a pile of torn scraps all ready to use in the three cold colors.

Since blue tissue paper tends to not bleed adequately, turquoise was used instead. Students were instructed to use purple in careful amounts as it tends to darken the work considerably. When the students realized that the color would not go where they had applied oil pastel, they were introduced to the term "resist."

After the work of layer two was completely dried, the last layer (more snowflakes and swirling lines) was added. This assignment was done over two days to allow for drying time.

Swirling snow lines were done lightly and the technique of using a "dry brush" was taught. More snowflakes were added in a variety of ways and a wider range of "cold colors" was possible by adding pencil crayons, wax crayons and paint to the materials available. Thin pencil crayons made quite a different snowflake than a fat wax crayon.

This was a good time to do vocabulary development--learning words such as periwinkle, lavender, a mauve. We had access to a commercial snowflake made of foam used for stamping some prints. Students were encouraged to make their flakes a wide variety of sizes, and go from very light to very dark colors.

The final touch for those who chose to use it was adding some silver glitter to a few of the flakes. This worked best when a toothpick was used to add thin glue lines to the flake so that a six spoked flake was seen.

I had brought a small container of silver glitter and was pleasantly surprised to see that it was designed like a salt shaker. Next time I order a large quantity of glitter, I will be putting it into a similar shaker. We used less glitter and had less mess.

As the work progressed, there was quiet murmuring as students complimented each other on their work. The students were 5th and 6th graders in age, but many of them were new arrivals in Canada who had not had a rich primary background with art materials.

The students had the genuine satisfaction that comes from creating a visually pleasing piece of work. Compliments from my colleagues about the work on display helped banish the winter blahs. The soft cold colors had sown their icy richness and magic.

A short while later, we were getting ready to see a play based on Robert Munsch and Michael Kusugak's book A Promise is a Promise (Annick Press Ltd., Toronto).[*] This Inuit tale is about a girl who goes to the edge of the sea ice and is captured by the scary Qallupilluit (Ka loo pee' loo eet), a troll-like monster who lives in the water.

What a wonderful experience it was to hear the children as they discussed the illustrations: "Look, the artist used cold colors to make the Arctic seem icier and colder." Then, at the theater, the students remarked how the stage designer and costume designer had made use of cold colors to create the Arctic environment for the play.

My students will never look at the grayness of winter the same way again.

[*] Other books by Michael Kusugak can be a wonderful starting point for a study of Canada's Inuit people. Their masks, soapstone carvings and printmaking should be introduced to all serious art students.

PHOTO (COLOR): RIGHT Qin Yu