ArtSpark! is the brainchild of Gabrielle Randazzo of Sonoma County. Pulling from credentials in art, education and psychology, she designed and implemented an extraordinary educational program based on learning through art. The program had been in force for over a year when she came to me wanting to document its results with a website. The age range of the students and the breadth of the curricula posed one of those fortunate problems of too much material. Biology and geometry illustrated in crayon detail, the mathematical rhythms of music, world cultures from folk art replicas. And reams of research and documentation to support the validity of a whole brain approach to learning.

I loved the texture of the children's oil pastel drawings and finally came up with a Photoshop rendition that I dropped into the page template as a background. The first round of pages used positioned layers, which faded from use in the CSS stytlesheet standards, so I think if I do templates again, I'll do them in basic HTML. The site is still up at www.artsparkinc.org, which is encouraging because we definitely need someone to be rethinking the public education model.