Animal Jam!! Cardboard Creatures

Thanks to our August campers for working so well on their cardboard creatures.  We were inspired by Thyra Heder's book Fraidy Zoo, and the creations from the "Cardboard Costume Challenge" at the Cardboard Collective  for our main projects. 

 

 

We also made an excellent 'wind ball', had a fun treasure hunt, and daily play in our 'claw' game (Thanks El and Lil!).

We made some glue gun sculptures, veterinary necklaces and wonderfully strange round things(food?) for our creatures out of balloons and flour--(Thanks Lil!).  

Walking and riding to visit our local parks in the afternoons was also always an adventure!! Thanks for an easygoing and creative time together. Happy rest of Summer!

Join The Global Cardboard Challenge: The Global Cardboard Challenge is an annual event presented by the Imagination Foundation that celebrates child creativity and the role communities can play in fostering it. This September, kids of all ages are invited to build anything they can dream up using cardboard, recycled materials and imagination. Then on Saturday, October 11th, 2014, communities will come together to play!

Happy Art Bubbles at Tom Thomson June 2014

I had a great time working with all the teachers, students and staff at Tom Thomson public school.  Wonderful artworks and awesome, original ideas were generated and shared school-wide in creating our Happy Art Bubbles.

This was a wonderful opportunity to work creatively with each student and class, in a variety of different collaborative situations. Students, and teachers, had media rich opportunities to express themselves, and represent their own feelings, through artmaking.

I loved the results as we worked on our art and as our bubbles reached the walls, giving anyone a chance to connect to their own and each others ideas during the school day. Thanks Tom Thomson, and especially Principal Randy Morassut and Teacher Angela Boers for asking me to frame this artmaking adventure.(some pics and project outline to follow)

Making mood faces...to animate our feelings...June 2014

 

We drew and painted worms one rainy day - trying out markers and watercolour.  We drew noses and mouths another day, and worked in our sketchbooks. 
We created plasticine masks with some p-mache, and mini clay creature heads that we painted and balanced on skewers and made mini pets for.  We did some cute group paintings and some silly, impromptu stop-motion animations as well.

And we created our own Mr. Moody's.  Ours give us a wide and entertaining range of often surprising expressions, as we invested in creating unique drawings for the features.  Our first Mr. Moody was a collaboration much like the 'exquisite corpse' game the Surrealists liked to do where each person was given a part to draw, but did not know what the previous person had drawn -  resulting in a surprising combination of features. We even had an opportunity to use Mr. Moody to gauge the mood in the studio when a discussion got over-excited...Mr.Moody's can be made into a fun and simple animation project too...rotating  and even swapping out features for quick changes.

 See this link for a simple how-to: http://www.mrprintables.com/learning-about-emotions.html