Happy Holiday!

A quick note to say we will be having an all day ArtClub
***on Wednesday. Dec. 19th.***

 

We did a great job with our Beaver sticks. We explored, and layered, first with
Transparent water colour, then Translucent tissue collage,  and finally Opaque acrylic
paint and jewels, as we painted and embellished our Beaver Sticks. Great work everyone!
I'll post our pictures shortly to share our work.  

Thank you to our very talented Artists for all their creative efforts and constructive sharing--I had a lot of fun working with each of you and was very inspired by your ideas, collaborations, explorations and the exciting work and presentations that came from that.

Happy Holiday and The Very Best Wishes for the New Year!

Tuesday's ArtClub:  We will start again on Tuesday, January 15^th. 

For this next session we will each choose an artist we like, to investigate, for a 6 week effort using our own ideas, inventiveness and creative skills to paint, draw, construct, write, illustrate and/or perform!

Wednesday's ArtClub Jr. :  We will start again on Wednesday, January 9^th  with rolling registration through the month of January. 

Our 6-week session will officially begin on January 23^rd, 2013.  For this next session we will learn about the work of artists Henry Moore and Emily Carr as we continue to express and explore our own creativity and skills in artmaking.

Artclub S2 wk3 - Beaver Stick Contour Rendering

We started by looking at our Beavers Sticks one more time before we work directly on them.

Our exercise was to follow the contours of the sticks with our 'china marker', starting at one edge of the page and ending at the other without lifting our markers. After we did one, we could do another from another position or different focus. I had brand new crayons(yup, crayola--too fun to resist), and brand new oil pastels to share so that we could explore different ways we might like to add colour, paint, mark, decorate or inscribe our sticks once we work on them...we did this as we explored different ways to mark and inscribe our drawings.

We talked about the idea of planning and building up ideas before starting in on the actual materials we might want to use as artists, because materials can be scarce, special and can be expensive, and so sketching, exercises and art explorations, while also works of art in themselves, help us realize our ideas more richly and in leading ways through our more ...let's say refined, work.

Then we sewed, setting out to create elements of our comic/graphic stories that we're working on. And we learned a lot about planning ahead through this as we cut our fabric and researched online and tried to imagine how to construct our plushies. We are simply creating forms with features, using felt and stitching.

Fun and lovely drawings.
Sylvie
(pics to follow!!)

Artclub Jr. S2 Wk3 Distinction and Care

This time we did the blind contour exercise using paper bags. Some of you were so cute reaching into the bag to find ...NOTHING!!  This was a more traditional blind contour exercise: we put our hands and china markers INTO the bag and had to draw something from the room without looking into our drawing bags.We did one object, flipped our bags over to do another, then ripped our bags, carefully, to reveal our efforts! Once we all figured out how to do the exercise, we had better effort but some of us were still a little suspicious of the process!!

We also chose our beaver sticks. We will be thinking about homes and places to live as we consider how to and if we even want to, paint and add to these already artful and naturally beautiful beaver sculptures.

We also discussed the idea of "taking care" as artists, how we do that with materials and ideas in our working, and also by taking care of our materials and tools in general.

 For our group painting this week, we each added some kind of creature to last week's painting but we drew them with my very fine charcoal pastels. Some of you very carefully explored colours within your own drawing, trying to relate your work to the painting underneath by using bright or contrasting colours, while others took care to select a colour they really liked, to try it against the background. All of us realized we needed some contrast for things to be seen. We also explored outlining here to help revela our drawings - to make them distinct, if we wanted to.

Artclub S2 wk2 Contour and Beaver Sticks

We are continuing on our comical works!  Some of us have decided to continue collaborating while others are going to work independently.  We can ask each other what we liked most, and found most challenging, of both processes at the end of the session.

We have lots of felt, embroidery floss and stuffing to work with. We are taking turns in "The Lab" to write and brainstorm with our partners, or on our own. There is still much drawing and writing left to do as we work out our ideas for our comic panels.

Our drawing exercise this week was traditional Blind Contour, using that paper plate and pencil contraption to remind us not to look at our drawing and to instead just look at the forms we are trying to draw and trust in our drawing hand. It can be hard to let go of what you think you KNOW about what you see and to just let your hand draw. Contour drawings, as we discussed,  are the OUTLINES of a the surface of something or someone. It is as if you are tracing along the edges of the form. Contour lines, for me, define the shape, the form and meaningful details of a thing--they are not shaded but for example, trace the shapes of shadows, colours and textures, to help define what you see in a form in outline. I think that is a little less traditional and may even be more gesture drawing...but I like things in contexts!

Generally, contour drawing exercises help us to translate what we see onto  our page using only outlines. As an exercise, they help our eyes and hands work together well, and build skills in acting on what we see through drawing.

Pics to follow!!

ArtClub S2 Wk 1 - Decisions & Directions

We've  started our next session with an awesome donation of beaver sticks(Thank you Brian and L.!!) which we are excited to imagine and create with.

We started today with quick drawing exercises. We are doing these every week to get us in a zone: this week was a play on "blind contour" drawing:

We had our hands feel objects in paper bags so that our hands, not our eyes, could tell us what to draw. This was challenging because right away we wanted to peak - something about wanting to "get it right". Once we were all clear this was not about our visual accuracy in depicting an actual object but more about feeling our way through, we made more confident marks, and could even listen better to what our hands were telling us.

We used charcoal, conte crayon, and brown craft paper - which helps us take up  a variety of techniques working out from light/white and dark/black marks. Our mylar, and even trace is nice for this as well.

After we each did 2-3 objects we looked into our bags to evaluate what we'd done - most of you felt strongly that it was important to get a resemblance, but were okay discovering and inferring the resemblance from what you'd drawn. There was still a sense that to 'get it right' meant 'guess the actual object' too. I think it was a challenging way to think about drawing - sort of taking things apart - and you met the challenge well!

We decided to work on comic books this session. We talked about ideas and decided to include soft sculpture elements and some individual and collaborative painting/drawing/collage works to exhibit with our comics.  As we worked we re-visited examples of soft sculpture works and researched "Plushies" which have a craft AND comic book element to them.

Some of you started to sew right away while storyboarding, and others went into "The Lab" to start by writing and storyboarding.  Great start and helpful too to plan for he materials we'll need for next time.

Sylvie
Pics to follow!!