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.