ArtClub Week 4

We discovered that tissue paper has a nicer effect for our papier mache, than newspaper, but that it also has some tricks to doing it well..use less paste, use our brushes more carefully and as brushes not glue daubers, and that layering is as important as making sure we have glue both under and above each piece to build a strong surface.  I was really happy for you not giving up even when some of you were getting frustrated- way to push through. It is a very meditative thing that you just kind of have to submit to if you want it to work out...which it can quite readily if you pay attention.

I LOVE our circle patterns--super quick and loose.  I have some EPIC favourites but I most like how they all look together. We can talk about grouping them in different ways as we hang them next week, and make a few more too...

and I think we should ALL make our own EPIC Smileys next time!

These aren't mine -  but the link isn't quite appropriate...so tricky... shown here are examples of work shown online.

ArtClub jr. Week 3

Great job! 

The group painting this week is very dynamic--the smaller canvas, and the light background seemed to help you to enjoy the brightness of our paints, blending colours with curiosity and enjoying some surprising results! You were very mindful of eachother's marks, with little prompting, which was just great to see...and it was exciting to see how you worked into what you found when it was your turn to paint. I think we do this each week but this painting seems so dynamic and unified too:  your efforts created a visual 'conversation' amongst all the parts of the painting... as if you were talking to each other, about something very colouruful, through the paint.

I love how you all figured out a unique approach to the clay challenge even when very inspired by eachother.

 Great details and added materials. That is mixed media: tree branches and clay and feathers and soon paint. These will be fun to paint this coming week. 

Heather and I really learned a lot from your presentations. You all found a "something that lives in something, and the something that it lives in", were very respectful of each others turn to speak, and shared your work with enthusiasm. That was fun. You may want to use your sketches next week.

We will look at the things in Spring that we find above the ground next studio!

Thank you.

Sylvie

ArtClub Week 3

This week we had a busy studio with much storytelling, and some quiet focus, as we developed our armatures for our papier-mâché sculptures ...and started building up our first layers too. We will need to add more layers next week, before we can decide what we really have to then paint, embellish and add external details ...although some of you are very clear about what you are making, we can still add features and other elements using our paper, wire, foil, tape, spheres and glue, to further define our creature characteristics.

Some of you were asking about our "big" project. And I said we are already doing it. We will work on circles and those logarithmic spirals going forward, both in drawing and painting...and words if you choose. And we will test out some ideas by making practice compositions - sketch some designs - to work into our canvas bases...as we continue with our 3-D creatures.

Thank you for a busy working studio with lots of great ideas!
(Pictures to follow.)

Sylvie

ArtClub week 2

Jorge Mayet
De Mis Vivos y Mis Muertos   2008

Electrical wire, paper, acrylics, fabric
143 x 84 x 84 cm

Thanks for another challenging studio.

Our exercise this week was arduous for some of us.  Don't Panic! Drawing 'what you see' can seem like a difficult challenge before you start...too much thinking about potential judgements of truth and reality - in relation to skill, and maybe also, at your age, starting to realize your own vision is connected to how others see reality too? This can seem daunting... but we're really just trying to connect our eyes to our hands through an exercise...an activation of 'being in the moment' so to speak. If that helps.  We're not expecting anything but effort from each other. That's why we call these exercises--or warm ups, if you prefer. Since we are a very non-judgmental group of collaborators in ArtClub anyway, it's only natural to expect that we each boldly risk trying new practices in our safe and friendly society. And truly, with only always awesome and inspiring results.

That's my speech. I learned a lot about each of you this week, and myself. Going forward we will go around the 'starts' of things a little bit to help us get right into the 'doing'.  I'm very excited and curious to see exactly how we're going to do that together!

You did some lovely work last week. I have less time than I thought to post pictures but these are very important because I want you to see how well you each drew, in so many different ways, to notice what you do well, and to learn through the experience of doing and reflecting. I think that's what we really call practicing. 

You each have unique approaches to your artmaking. As you learn to work through new and challenging experiences your ability to realize the skills you need, to build your vision, will grow.

We are continuing with our cycles this next studio. We will build these out through some papier-mâché constructions(as requested!). If you come prepared to construct something, then we can start to construct something, literally.

Also, think about ways your cycles end at their beginnings, but in a transformed state...and how you can show this. Draw or write some differences between the beginning and the end of your cycles - what are the different characteristics?How are they different? How do these differences indicate a transition? Asking yourself these questions might help you to visualize, or imagine, the different stages in your cycle and to inform and enrich details to add to your work next week, and going forward. 

I have some new paints to share, and some canvasses that we can also work on in a cyclical fashion for the rest of this session. 

Thanks for your excellent efforts this past week...and some very challenging insights during our explorations of roots and shoots...

Sylvie

And thank you Heather for our uprooted Tulip!

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!