Spring Artclub Jr. Week 2

  Our Spring Forest is growing!

You worked so intensely on your snails, butterflies or worms and your traced roots and made very inventive connections between our creatures, their pathways, and how to join these pieces for exhibition.

We're  building a great inspiration board that we are sharing with the Big Kids ArtClub, and we definitely took advantage of these ideas. I'm inspired too watching you all work so well!

 Next week we will add something new to our forest trees. You can also make changes to this week's work, if you discover that you want to.

Thanks for your amazing energy and efforts towards these lovely results.

Sylvie

First Spring ArtClub Jr.

What an exciting and energetic first meeting. I can't believe how great our trees look! We had a little bit of time to talk about and look at our trees while we were working on them and then, as we hung them up - it is very inspiring to hear and see all of your ideas. Here is the start of our Spring Forest:

You all took up the challenge today by working well on drawing and painting, and cutting too. 

 We explored textures, patterns, colours and feelings and also added ninjas, racoons and cranes, bugs and tree forts, leaves and flowers. We'll take up these ideas next week. Your 'trees' are very unique. We'll leave them up to inspire us to create more work as if in a Spring Forest!

(M. still has her tree to do and add it to our forest...with her many drawings and sketches : ) [Finished and included above!]

Remember if you do take your sketchbook home, to work in it a little and don't forget to bring it next week - you will need it again!

Our group painting today looks very dense and really foresty to me: for some reason you all favoured blues and greens and that nicely mixed "perfect potato brown"...[we added to this! See week 2!]

Thanks for a very exciting and productive first day!

Sylvie

Painting with Water - remaining to be seen

For our first studio, we worked on a large group drawing as we talked about different ideas of Spring, the concept of 'cycles' and the concept of 'local'. We all did a first drawing of a robin. We also tried to paint with the giant water brushes but our paper got very wet, very quickly. We'll wait for a warmer day, with some sun, to try this again outside on the asphalt.

If something is ephemeral, it changes over time, it transforms. Ephemeral things are 'transitory', changing states, seeming to disappear. Ice is ephemeral on a hot summer day, and a water painting on warm asphalt is ephemeral as it changes from a 'picture' to a 'memory' of a picture, or the memory of the activity of water painting. Much about Spring is ephemeral.

The word cartoon can mean a few different things to artists too. Traditionally, if you wanted to create a painting, you would draw or paint a 'cartoon' as a base layer to work out/plan tones, colours, or formal areas. This is a useful method for deliberately structuring a representation. I use a cartoon to paint portraits. It helps me decide what I want to do, where it needs to be done, and helps me to keep track of some of my original intention as I build up layers of colour and tone into a resemblance.

But... I also 'cartoon' as a way to sketch out a quick visual idea in a graphical way. Sometimes these cartoons, usually a contour type sketch, or very stylized graphic, is the final work.

You can find cartoons in artists drawings as much as in comic books, graphic novels and animations. In fact, old school cel animation uses 'cartoons' to make...cartoons! We also cartoon when we use our ipad or mspaint to draw things with graphical lines and colours. 

In what ways are cartoons ephemeral? (Ephemera is the noun.)

You all show a lot of interest in drawing things graphically, in a sort of diagrammatic explanation of what something is, or what actions are happening - and with the expectation that more conversation needs to happen to explain the drawing. This is an interesting possibility for our drawings.

This session, we can explore our own approaches to drawing through more drawing(and painting). As we draw and paint each week, we can look for our own connections between how each of us sees something, and what we are each saying about this something through our drawings and paintings.

Remember that next studio we are looking at your 3 or 4 part 'Cycles'. We'll use these to help create our book works. Because we don't yet know how our work will look, we are going to create a mini book (our mock up ...which is also a cartoon of sorts). We will use this to play with our ideas, to help us visualize what we want to do for our finished books, and to help us keep track of some of our intentions~while new ones are forming!
Just a quick link to a water writing machine by Canadian artist/designer Nicholas Hanna.

A review of 'metaphor', for reference.

Something about artist David Ireland, fyi.

....and thank you for a challenging, and inspiring, first meeting!
Sylvie

Art Club Spring 2012

We'll explore ideas of Nature this session. In consideration of Springtime, we'll be looking at and creating representations of transformation, renewal and growth. (Looking at: butterflies, seedlings, trees, rivers, and clouds; ideas of life cycles through visual narrative; and growing our own stories and myths.)

Check here for Summer 2012 ~ ArtClub in July.

Awesome March Break ...Thank You!

Thank you to everyone involved in making our March Break Art Club+ so much fun!(will post some pictures soon--and send that info, your files, and shareware out as well).

Also, let me know if you are interested in meeting once or twice a month for more Robotics. We are going to be working on some "hacks" and building on our learning from March Break.

Our Robot mornings were very busy, with you campers leading very quickly into new and more challenging programming ideas. You are very good learners and very patient with yourselves (and your "teachers"!)... your efforts paid off with great thinking and learning about the possibilities of programming, and by working complicated, and often repetitive, tasks into your Robots accomplishments.

We learned about GUI, sensors, sub-routines and plotting on an x,y axis. We wrote our letters, and our names, and we created great Robot art...inspired by and building on each others ideas. You all did a really great job committing to the work with enthusiasm, and having fun with it too.

We also discovered our elastic cars worked best with rubber-band tires,our ornithopter crashed slightly less with a shorter tail, and that we can take great photos and use the computer to manipulate how they look. So glad we got our plastic hardened before a certain someone ate it all, phew! Friday's robot ballet and demo's was a nice way to share what we had done with our new friends.

We had great special guests for Drama games(Thank you Krystii!) and Photography (Thank you Maylynn!) And our always special, talented, and fearless Recreation Expert Heather kept everyone on task and schedule...and so much more. Thank you again! Our Tech expert "Mr.Walsh"(another big Thank You!) guided us through the technologies of Robotics and led us into our daily efforts on the computer as we chased down our own ideas. Great job grown-ups!

Our youngest campers made lovely artworks each morning - exploring clay, paint, food, sound potions, natural and found objects, and paper mache, amongst other materials. Then you(they) joined our older campers for lunch and our afternoon activities. We made some space art, we did our colour wheels, learning new terms and mixes, we did bubble art, and tried out our formulas for bubble mix and bubble blowers(well, mostly Heather and I worked on that while you all enjoyed sunny weather, the swing and the hammock!!)...We explored in the yard with sticks, discovered and dug up moss and worms, and made mouse and fairy houses too...we loved playing Beaver Sam(thanks L.), had fun with chalk, loved playing our games with Krystii, and doing our shadow puppet plays.

I really enjoyed our week together. Thanks to all for joining in, contributing ideas and sharing in the fun.
Sylvie

(fyi: Art Club Spring Session will start the week of April 10th. Tuesdays and Wednesdays as usual)

Our last Winter Art Club! L’espace de l’écriture: suggesting the surreal.

Our last ArtClub for the Winter! We were very busy and did two quick projects as well as arranged our work for our show.

For our first project we took our cut pages and painted ANYTHING on them with our transparent watercolour paint. We then glued them to cardstock, added other marks, paint or pen/pencil. Some of you emphasized words on the page, others were inspired by a word or phrase they found, and others ignored the meaning of the words but expressed elements of a story you wanted to tell—i.e Pandora’s box became an abstract painting of translucent red. We signed our work on the front when it was done and displayed them in the stairwell. Pictures to follow shortly.

We also each thought of an object and drew it in a quick sketch. We made some word associations and strung these into descriptive word/sentence-poems. We decided these were "word/sentence-poems" because we were not going to be troubled by correct sentence structure, or even spelling...which means we took poetic license! We redrew our objects very lightly on large paper and drew over our lines with our words and sentences with the goal that every line in the picture was made of words. Your Calligrammes were fun, spontaneous and very inventive.

Both of these projects can be done anytime as a fun exercise for your sketchbooks, and can be done quickly- as we did, or more thoughtfully where you can explore unusual, complex, personal, or direct ideas and relationships between your words and your images.

Thank you for sharing and presenting your work with our guests at our show. You all did a great job! And thank you for a really interesting ArtClub session - all of you made unique and wonderful contributions to our time together and added to the quality of the work we created!

Our next session will start the week of April 10th, 2012. Hope to see you there!

I'm also looking forward to seeing those who are able to come for March Break, starting Monday, March 12th. We're going to have a lot of creative fun!

Sylvie

Winter Art Club Week 5

Great work from excellent efforts!!

Sylvie

Animation and puppy fun!

Try this cel animation fun at The Independent Lens at pbs.org. This section of their site has lots of neat facts and information about the film STILL LIFE WITH ANIMATED DOGS by Paul Fierlinger.

Look at this clever,(vintage) animation by Paul Fierlinger via Sesame Street:

To find out more, see:   http://youtu.be/V2GAPTbEX9E

Winter Art Club Jr. Week 4 Still Life

Great work today!

We worked in our sketchbooks and on a different kind of group painting on paper, on the floor! And you showed great teamwork inventing and mixing 'tangerine'.
We looked at the artist Cezanne, and his work with still-life painting, and learned about mixing paint and colour, and treating our painting tools with care so they can keep on doing their job.
Thanks to all of you for leading the studio today with your many different approaches to thinking about painting as drawing, and still life.
A lot of what we did reminds me of Cezanne's work: He is very well known for his special way of looking at and capturing a moment - and then showing how colour is an integral part of how we each see and understand a form of something in that moment.
I think you all did a great job today investigating Cezanne, colour, painting and capturing your ideas of still-life.
Sylvie

Winter Art Club Week 4 Ink and Paint

This was a very free painting and sharing session. Thanks to everyone for sharing some work they are doing or have done before.
We ran out of time, and ink, outside today(my neighbours said"phew!"). Really neat teamwork on your 'mop' paintings. Oh my, they are good-messy and spontaneous... and THAT is about the BEST part of using Indian Ink to me! They look like 'action', 'darkness' and an 'effort to show "distinct" gesture'. We'll look at them next week and see how they inspire us.
Some of you started a whole new painting on canvas board and/or paper this week too...and some are finished too! Others ran out of time. We will have a little time next week to work back into those if you want to.Thanks F. for the idea to revisit our 'Consequence' pictures(silly creatures) using the face instead - great idea!

So: we have our funny-faces, and a technique for creating random likenesses, skills working with paint and ink, canvas and collage, and some random word selections too. You have also all developed a palette of colours that you each seem to like to work in. Let's bring all these elements together into our studio next week to create a likeness of ourselves. A likeness is something that looks like something, resembles -- but we can take this to mean how each of us see's ourselves at that time, and within an artwork- and that will be our starting point.

Our last Art Club for this session will be on Tuesday, Feb 21st...too soon!! Invite your parents to come early for our art show(5:15) that day, and we'll talk about how we want to hang our work next week.

Keep drawing and writing and sharing,
and thanks for a great job today!

Sylvie

Winter Art Club Week 3 - P.O.V.

We were very busy this studio.

You applied gesso to your canvasses with skill, and patience too as they dried. Your funny faces gave us a great start to talking about exaggerations and even how things actually change in appearance when we change our point of view(how we look at something).

Some very off-the-wall 'What-ifs' from all of you! And some funny word lists too. And I think these two activities really inspired your paintings this week.

Some of you chose to continue on in your investigations and are exploring abstraction and abstract expression with paint--and it is great to see you finding inspiration in each others work and watching how you paint out your ideas and feelings.

Some of you drew characters and tried to resolve something about them through your drawing and painting - which is always exciting to see.

Even those of you who already knew their character before you started to draw, changed them by how you chose to represent them...whether ninja's or a movie robot: these representations share something about you because they came from your hand and share how you were inspired...this too talks about point-of-view!

Great work! We can finish these next week, if you haven't yet, and we'll start our GIANT brush work next time.

Sylvie

Winter Art Club Jr. Week 3 - Patterns

Fun playing today with our puppet show! Lots of dancing, pretending and silly situations for all our dragons, characters and things-on-sticks!
Everyone did a really great job adding to our painting from last week too. Even those of you who weren't feeling quite well made a great effort! The charcoal line drawings you did over our painted background made a very lively art work. You worked out your own themes and inspired each other with: egg shapes, then birds, then dinosaurs with eggs, then moving lines in pathways to birds and eggs... and then canoes(are canoes like half- eggs?)...It makes me think about water, and the big and small things we find in lakes, movement and different surfaces, and also, in a kind of overall way, the idea of water dragons.

Thanks to R. for sharing her paisley-pony today. It gave us great ideas for our drawing patterns and the palette of colours we used to explore them. Exploring patterns was a fun way to try out crayon resist too- that was when we made some lines and patterns in the light coloured crayon, then washed over them gently with our watery paint.

Thanks for a very fun studio!

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

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)