It was all about eggs last week at the San Benito Street Art Academy, where teacher Evelyn Pogrowski talked to the young students about the art of decorating eggs.
The botanical egg art class has three sessions that will meet once a week through the month of March, just in time for the kids to master the skill of decorating eggs before Easter.
Pogrowski, who offers a different theme for the art classes each month, showed the students some of her prize collection. Pogrowski has some eggs that are hollowed out and colorfully decorated with geometric patterns that she purchased in Pennsylvania. She also has some eggs that she has decorated herself through the years.
“The ones in our class are regular, hard-boiled eggs,” she said, showing the children some white and brown eggs. “Eggs are made to fall. They will roll off the table and fall on the floor.”
She asked the students to set their eggs in a spot where they wouldn’t roll around if they had to set them down.
“I’m Polish and in my culture, we decorate eggs like this,” she said, holding up one of the intricately decorated, hollow eggs. “These eggs, you can’t buy here. You have to make them.”
She explained how artists would use a needle to put a small hole in the top and the bottom of the egg, and then blow out the egg yolk and white. She said they wouldn’t be doing that in class, but instead would stick with the hard-boiled eggs.
As she shared some of the past eggs she had decorated, she had the students shake the eggs gently by their ears and listen to the sounds inside.
One boy said it sounded like there was a rubber ball inside. She said the egg was so old that the egg white had dried out, but the yolk was still inside the shell. She talked about how they could store their eggs in a cool, dry place away from animals or insects, and how the eggs would last for a long time. She showed an egg that she made five years ago and another that she made eight years ago.
For the first week’s session, the students learned how to decorate a geometric pattern onto the eggs. She had them draw a line from the top of the egg down to the bottom and back around. Then they drew a line around the middle of the egg and dissected it into quadrants.
After the students had divided the eggs into squares, the kids selected two color pencils to fill in the shell with a checkerboard pattern.
“It looks simple, but it does take a lot of work,” she said.
While some of the students followed the basic pattern of alternating colors back and forth for each square, others got a little more creative. Two boys decorated their eggs to look like a football, while another used multiple colors to make his egg bright. Yet another decided to color his egg entirely with a gold pencil to make it into a golden egg.
As the children worked on their eggs, Pogrowski talked about different size eggs such as those from quails. And some the kids laughed at the idea of bringing in a dinosaur egg.
