Slowfire Seniors!

We work with many seniors at the Oak Park Public Library, Oak Park Township, and Brookdale Senior Center in addition to our seniors classes at Slowfire 2 at 907 S Lombard Avenue.

Josslyn (Painting & Drawing Teacher)

I teach weekly classes at the Oak Park Public Library, Oak Park Township, and Brookdale Senior Center, and have really enjoyed getting to know the Oak Park senior community. When teaching seniors, my approach is to emphasize technique building and foundational skill set building so students can take their artistic vision to the next level. I am a flexible, patient teacher who has the ability to scale up or down my projects as needed in order to meet the student where they are at with their skills. A recent example is a five part series of 2 hour long classes I taught at the Library. The coursework was a series of watercolor workshops where we explored different watercolor techniques. The topics we covered were: realism, watercolor painting & color matching, fruit painting, floral paintings & landscape composition. We learned the importance of starting light and working our way up with darker values in order to achieve well rounded watercolor paintings.

Please see images below!

Salma (Ceramics Teacher)

I enjoy working with many art mediums, especially clay! My focus with seniors is teaching ceramics hand-building and surface design. I teach projects where we focus on one skill, such as building with slabs or building with coils, and we make functional, customizable objects, such as birdhouses, planters, plates, and cups! Recently, my students and I built windchimes out of clay. We handbuilt each component, using pinchpot and sculptural techniques and talked about scale and proportion. After the clay was fired once, we painted and glazed our works so they would be glossy and can withstand weather. I teach weekly classes at Brookdale Senior Center and at Slowfire. My goal is to bring fresh ideas and projects to the classroom and provide support and guidance where needed.