Our last Tuesday Art Club for this Session!

Your portal improvisations were brilliant, creative, well-spun and on the spot. We can spin a tale on the fly, or with short notice, or spin it through much reflection, carefully developed over time - I can't really say either way is better, just different ways to different kinds of stories.

Incorporating portal technologies into our work today was very exciting, traveling to ancient shrines in ink, or duplicating and painting on a drawing to express the experience of it-great ideas and work! Using 3-D objects (found objects like the ear bud portal, or natural elements, or made objects like a ratatouille recipe or a translucent overlay) gives layers to how we can relate to your stories, as does the way you collaged your own work back into your pages. That is like traveling back and forth through time because we are revisiting our old work while creating new work.

You are all very good at playing off you own and each others ideas, and attentively incorporate these into your own work or into collaborations. It's really great to see how you share while giving and receiving proper credit - it acknowledges we are having a conversation with each others ideas - through our work. So props to all of you.

Leave your books around where you can see them...and work on them again if you want to - you'll know when they're finished - and let them inspire other ideas for you! Some of the things you have already done that you can use to help you finish, or start something else, include: adding or repeating elements of content including layout elements; different uses of medium and style for effect; working in wordless, text-only and combined formats of representation and using all of these to start stories; working with collage, ink, drawing, painting, photos and scans; as well as shifts/contrasts in scale, colour, style and media...

Carry on then...and if you are newly joining us, or returning next session, you're welcome to briefly present something, that you've created, to the group at our first meet up on January 17th.

Happy Holidays!
Sylvie

Art Club Jr. Week 5 - Mobility

Wow! You all did such good work, in such a short time, with such unique results!

We will have time next week to add finishing touches to our mobiles and to set up for our art exhibition. We will show our parents and friends all our work and also get a chance to talk about what we've made, and what we like about each others work, over some treats.

Thank you so much for power-house glueing, taping, drawing, assembling and for the very dark and sparkling painting of a buried, layered rainbow tree man and hidden numbers...Great team work!...

I'm actually wondering if it will ever dry :)

I'll take a picture of your painting in the daylight tomorrow, and post it then:
Sylvie

More links

As requested from jr's. and sr's. some arts and culture fun links:

Art Club Week 5

Lots of great sharing of our ideas, and working, during studio. Awesome!

You've all presented fun, interesting, and different, approaches to telling stories through words and pictures and it's exciting to see your choices. I really enjoy the elements of humour and science fiction that keep coming up in our stories and our notions. You are all successful at finding artistic challenges in what you are doing, which is really helping you to move forward with your work.

Let's see how much of our books we can finish next class. We are still thinking about eventually sharing editions of a finished work with each other.

We discussed portals again...they seem to be our theme for this session...ways to transport between two places, or times, or... ways of saying something? How might a book, or a comic-book, be like a portal?

Next week is our last session until after the Holidays. Please bring your books to finish. Also bring something more to share about your own portal ideas - you've all got great designs.

Here's a challenge: Explain your portal picture by answering the following three questions: 'How does it work?', ' Where does it take us from, and where can it take us to?' and finally 'What do we see during transport?'...and you can refer to Dr. Who, Star Wars and even Santa Claus, if you like, but use your imagination to try to see your own vision of the answers to these.

Sylvie

Art Club Jr. Week 4 - Surfaces

Thank you again for all your efforts this studio.

We worked on a new painting that let you each work both independently and collectively. It's interesting how you each made marks on your masks in different styles and mediums...with very different and personal results. This is an interesting group work that is made of multiples of the same idea: a face.

We had a drawing fort this week, and took turns working in that space. This resulted in a lot of interesting, and silly, conversations as we worked.

We coloured, decorated and created more animals from our print-outs using paint and markers. Next week we will do more explorations with them, painting some more, tracing them, making silhouettes, and embellishing. We will also work on our cutting and gluing.
You all did a great job learning new skills: using sandpaper, and painting on challenging shapes - in this case our sticks! Sometimes we want to smooth things before we paint them...it makes a new surface for the paint to stick. We don't have to, but the sticks we had got so nice and smooth, it was a fun exercise. We'll continue to work on our sticks next time too.

Have a great week! And remember our last studio is on Friday, Dec.16th, not Thursday...we changed the date so we are not so rushed. This will be our art exhibition and our parents and friends can have time to look at all our work.

Sylvie

Link to how-to cartoon fun!

Here's a very helpful DIY (Do It Yourself) guide to making an 8 page comic: RIGHT CLICK YOUR MOUSE HERE and select 'SAVE LINK AS' to download the PDF File.

This is from Scholastic and The Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont.

Art Club Week 4

That was a whirlwind of work. Here's a quick review that includes some things to think about, or even work on - if you have some time.

We looked at formats and made some decisions about our work. We did more action paintings and will incorporate those into our projects. Keep in mind that we are presenting our work to each other in our last studio(December 12th). Our goal is to finish an object/bookwork that, while an excerpt of all our work, is also a standalone.

You can continue to do your mock-up for your project ... remember to include loose drawings of the pictures you want in your project. And include a layout of how you want each page to look. The mock-up isn't fussy, with refined drawings, but it details what you need to do(like scanning, or more drawing, or text and more writing) to make your project.

You can continue to draw your layout so that you are prepared next class to play with, assemble, assess and construct your project. This will be messy, crafty and fun. And please take note of any images or text you want me to scan, scale, or print for your final project/format.

Some of you requested this link: STARWARS.COM, but I think this one is really fun!

Last week we worked on the different scale of an object, and tried to represent that. Scale can create a tension in our images when we are surprised by how they look different from what we expect, what they would look like normally...we wonder why. This is part of storytelling.

This week we talked about tension between our words and our images. Aside from doing dialogue bubbles, you can work your words into your images in ways that surprise and even redirect the story, they can contrast with your images! Surprises between your images and your words provides a kind of narrative tension that helps to build meaning in a graphic story.

I will have supplies prepped for next time that will help you construct and assemble, assess and finalize.

Ok! One more thing: make time for drawing, and writing, everyday. Even if you only have 2 minutes! Get your ideas down on paper!

Sylvie

Art Club Jr. Week 3

That was fun!Thank you to Mme. for the Barbara Reid book! It helped us explore our plasticine in such interesting ways. It is called synchronicity when things seem to line up in coincidences.
We had a new friend join us this week and together made a glittery group painting with lots of paint drips and bold brush strokes. We found numbers on our board that we incorporated into our work, and drew butterflies, balloons, and many different kinds of lines.
We spent extra time on our plasticine relief pictures,
which led us to start to build homes for our creature creations.
We had some very lively conversations about our work, learning about vampire and zombie conflicts, birds that fly when moons touch the ground, and the many favourite parts of our pictures. Some of us found extra time to work in our sketchbooks, and some of us even ran out of time to draw!
Next week we can look at our favourite animals again, and our new creatures too, and try to imagine ways they move.

Great work everyone!
Sylvie

Art Club Week 3

This week saw us moving into different directions with our projects.

We talked about the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and Jackson Pollock, and read a short comic by Jessica Abel about Graphic Novels. We did some action painting and graphic investigations. We used ink and paper, and quills too - you have great ideas!
We are working towards creating narrative through words and objects that construct this. Sometimes our stories are not going to emerge until we make our objects or images, perform our artmaking, and that is another way to find your story: by doing it! We are all working on a kind of conversation between our own story--in words, actions or feelings, and our different methods and media for making art.
We also shared more of our stories: either by reading aloud, or by relating our feelings to what we were doing(this is also a narrative, a personal narrative, that can reveal or even decide where we want to go in our work during our studio time).
Thank you all for your very interesting explorations this week.

Keep trying to imagine how you will actually construct(frame) your story as a material object: think about book formats like mini-comics, or accordion books, as structures for a graphic 'novel'; think about a multi-sided object as it relates to multiple viewpoints in a story, and think about painting as a performance of storytelling and how you could share that kind of story with others. These are all things we talked about this week. What can these forms of art say - what is the story they are telling?...
We can share our thinking at our next meet-up :)
Sylvie

Art Club Jr. Week 2

Art Club Jr. you are a talented group!

This week we enjoyed listening to Raffi during our mark-making. We looked at work by British artist Robert Bradford for some inspiration:

and started right in by decorating our favourite animals:
We also started another group painting with lots of wisps of paint strokes. It seems very abstract (doesn't really represent something we would literally see in life) and in some parts very expressive (shows a lot of feeling). We can continue to add to this one next week, or start another.

We created amazing creatures from our imaginations. Your creatures are so lively and animated--we will need to spend a few minutes next class having them do more dancing and playing together. Do you think they need names?
When we finished our creatures, you all nicely asked to get your sketchbooks and just started working on some drawings with interest and determination. That was awesome.

Thank you for a great class. We will work with our animals more next week. We can make them a home, make them some parents or even make them some new friends out of different materials.
Have a great week and thank you again for all your art work and play!
Sylvie

Art Club Week 2

Hi Art Club! This week saw a really big start into thinking about what an imaginary character might look like. While some of you continued to share your actual stories, adding details and visual elements, others explored different ways an artist can tell a story...with words in different shapes and forms, as an image, and as an image from the story in a dream.
Keep thinking about what you want to try next week. We are working towards creating a book( a sequence that tells a story in words or images). If you would like to build something like a model or sculpture from one of your ideas, let me know by next class.

There are many ways to tell a story. You can tell a story with words or pictures. You can tell a tale in real, linear time, or by jumping across time, or even completely out of order(remember we discussed 'portals' as both a way to travel through time or space, and as a visual image). You can tell a story from many points of view. You can tell a story through images that are mysterious and even nonsensical. These can all be called 'narratives'.

If you have time, please try to storyboard this week. This can help you decide where you want your story to go, and help you to create some exciting work in a visual and not necessarily linear, sequence. Try to draw before you write (or don't write at all this week!) and see what your images say about your ideas.

Next class, please come prepared to work with black ink, paint and collage. We are building our sketchbooks, and our final projects, at the same time and next weeks studio will help each of you clarify what you would like to say.

Thanks for an inspiring class!
Sylvie

Art Club Jr.

Our first Art Club Jr. was great fun! We worked on a group painting that is looking very tropical, started our sketchbooks, and our thinking, about our favourite animals and where they live.



We also learned about new materials like soft vellum paper, squeaky-smooth Mylar paper, ink and charcoal, and we made some very lively ink pictures.

Next week we will re-visit our favourite animals, and the drawings we made in our sketchbooks, to help us create sculptural works.

Well done artists!

If you need to contact me during the week, your Mom or Dad can call me, they can email to: artclubjr@freshorange.ca or you can just look for me, or Heather, in the school yard.

Thank you all for working so hard in the studio!

Sylvie

Art Club

What a fun first class for Art Club!! We are such a creative group of writers and artists - I'm looking forward to seeing how our stories turn out! Thank you.

And thanks to Heather for taking up the mini Art Club adventures!!

If you need to contact me during the week, you can call me (your Mom or Dad have the number), you can email to: artclub@freshorange.ca or just look for me, or Heather, in the schoolyard.

Keep thinking about what places your characters might find themselves in, a challenge that they will face, and how we can frame these through our words and by how we draw them.

And I am going to look up your family names - if you have time you can ask your parents for a brief history.

We will continue building our story and story characters through writing, drawing and sharing next week.

Thanks so much!
Sylvie