Friday, January 27, 2012

Winter Art Club Jr. Week 2

Thank you for your drawing and crafting today. You did a lot of work in a short time and found a fun way to share your work with each other in your puppet play-&-dance party.

You all created very lively, and varied works around our Lunar New Year theme. We had some free drawing time, then started right into constructing our fans, dragon/creature puppets and masks. You each made different choices in your approach to our project, and made great selections of materials, techniques and templates to work from.

Most of you also had time to help create the group painting. Since some of you didn't get a chance, for whatever reason, we will leave it up to work on next time, with different materials for you to use. It will be exciting to see what you come up with.

We will, of course, also do a new group paint since we love to paint.

Next Wednesday, we will first start with the rest of our puppet play & dance, and see what else that will inspire us to draw and make.

Thank you for your awesome efforts!
Sylvie

Winter Art Club Week 2

Thank you for an inspired session.

We talked about Lunar New Year this week and looked at some drawings of dragons as well as images of dragon kites flying through the sky.


This is the year of the water dragon for Chinese New Year.

We looked at work by artist Yue Minjun and we talked a little bit about the differences between
cultural and religious celebrations.

You did a great job with your
blind contour drawings.

Your paintings give us a range of collaborative efforts to look into. And they seem to reflect our discussion earlier: they are quite abstract and there is a
real feel of festival; dimension and space; and flying and dancing colours. There are really interesting positive and negative spaces created between the paper and paint as well. We can talk and think more about these ideas, and how the images inspired us, next time.
This Tuesday, we will work more on exaggeration and gesture as we start our canvasses - I'll have your funny faces for you too! We will also work on some of our writing next studio.
Have a great week!
Sylvie

Monday, January 23, 2012

Our First Winter Wednesday Art Club Jr.

We're a talented new group with a lot of energy and ideas.

Our first group painting was well negotiated, and worth those efforts. Thank you all for working so well together. It is interesting to me how the lines and the colours play together, and how it seems very balanced with no area asking for more attention that another area - except maybe the blue line at the top...and then that
unpainted space attached to it above. It might seem to frame the work, kind of like that space at the top wants to be the boss and only watch the fun...but then those cloud shapes just hang on there, talking to the line, to keep it all part of the group.

I was impressed with how well you copied my patterns into your sketchbooks. I gave you some complicated challenges.. but you did a really great job with them! You're already very good at drawing what you see.

We talked about the artist
Matisse, and about collage and negative space, as we tried our own mixed-media explorations... with exciting and unique results.

We'll use some of these ideas again next week, and invent some of our own techniques, to make masks and puppets.

pictures to follow soon!

Sylvie

Our First Winter Tuesday Art Club

It was great to see everyone, and to work with our new group.

We did some interesting contour drawings as we warmed up - these are also mini still-life drawings which you can set up for yourself anytime and anywhere.

We also created some silly character's in our group and then you did some very individual works exploring ink, charcoal pastel, smudging and ways of looking at the elements of a whole. Thank you all for bringing your enthusiasm, and great ideas, to our first studio.

Next week, you can work from the character you started this week(or create a new one), using paint and text. In this case, text means words that you
visually incorporate into your work. We will be exploring exaggeration through words, and using both images and text.

Please try to find time to draw or write in your sketchbooks everyday. And it doesn't matter
what so much as that you get something down.. just a few minutes is fine.

Something to think about:
Whats and Thats start to work together the more you practice...what's a what and what's a that?
If you like, you can show and tell us your thoughts about this next studio.

Thanks again for your efforts!
Sylvie
(pictures to follow soon)