Mask Workshop 2014

Thanks to everyone for some inspired mask/crown making.  We were a young crowd and you all helped make Halloween a hoot(and howl) too. I will post your lovely works here shortly.  From idea starts, sketches or models(maquettes), to building bases/structures(armatures), making decisions, deciding surfaces and details- you all put in excellent effort and your work looks just great! Well done!

Our inspiration table...

 

November ArtClub News

ArtClub AfterSchool:  Drawing Club 

Wednesdays - Nov. 12th thru Dec 10th: Drawing+!!!

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 PA DAY ArtClub on October 10th
Will post our Apple Faces soon!!

 

 

 

  

Candy corn sketches...

PA Day candy corn and lentil mosaic...

 PA Day ArtClub Camps All-Ages
Friday, November 21st - 2014
Thinking Cotton Ball/fabric Soft Sculptures, Snowflake Watercolour Paintings, Stick Creatures and Stars...
Friday, January 30th - 2014

Thinking about sky, weather and/or fireworks paintings, Chinese New Year Celebrations and the Chinese Zodiac - 2015 is the year of the Goat!! Maa...What do goats do well?
We can make, and train our own small clay dragons....and record a short skit or animation for them too.
Register early!

Please book ahead to confirm a spot, space is limited!!
Email or call Sylvie at 905-639-8545.  

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

 

Starting our Mask Making on Paper forms using plastecine for Paint!

We took a vote to start our masks without drawing and sketching first - going straight to our plasticine. After a few minutes some of us realized that we don't actually like to work that way - returning to drawing to coax out an idea, while others started exploring and experimenting with the clay, taking photos of their work, then trying out new ideas.

We've decided to document our plastecine creations as we go--trying to remember some of our ideas that we leave behind as we re-work. We also agreed to all follow through with a final working form, a papier mache session, further construction-if we want, and paint/embelishment.

We discussed that our masks will be one-sided(we are not going to work on the inside) because we liked wearing them, and especially had a lot of fun finding out how expression and facial gestures are related and can, sometimes very simply, suggest emotion and character traits.

Tracing National Geographics Spring 2014...pics soon

We are off to an interesting start this session creating hybrid animals. We are also learning about rendering a drawing/drawn idea into a different media.

We started by experimenting with tracing paper and photo's of animals to mash up some creatures, and as a starting point for inspiration and consideration. While not necessarily teaching us the importance of eye-to-hand drawing, I think tracing can teach us a lot about looking, and what 'drawing' really means to us. Also, trying to transfer a 'realistic' image-trying to capture an index or 'realism' of an image, with tracing paper is a very quick and useful tool that turns us into a kind of human photocopier or even emotional printer. Much like a camera might give us an illusion of objectivity, a tracing can give us an illusion of accuracy, opening up other channels of engagement in creative mark-making--perhaps asking us to re-locate our considerations of what a drawing should be.

We all got very excited about the accuracy, and the failed accuracy, in our work, and we all accepted our work as a kind of copying exercise - learning that we are taking & making selections from existing material - and then discovered that there was more we could do, and were inspired to do, to make the work our own. So tracing can offer a  really good experience in understanding where we copy things, why 'accuracy' may or may not be the most important signifier to our work, and where we invent and  innovate. We will continue with transparencies, adapt something from our original tracing, and create a 3-D mask invention along side this process to see what connects.

We are not taking tracing lightly. I'll give a bit more thought to Artists we can look at.

Potion to make a monster...eventual faces in 5 Steps?

We started this session by drawing and painting large eyes (will post pics soon) and making monster faces in 4 steps. I think this helped us to let go, or notice, our own ideas of a 'right' way to get at a representation of a face.

We worked a bit on our painting skills on our Monster faces.

Here is our potion(formula) to make a monster appear:
top of head and forehead

eyebrows and eyes-no nose
nose from under eyes to tip of mouth

mouth and chin below

And then this appeared!?

I would really like to see a large format collage face from all of our pieces and drawings of parts of wholes as a final work from each of us. And I think we are due for a large "puppet" head for our group project.

(pics of actual human features to be posted soon...can't find my camera charger!!)

Barbara Reid

We worked on plasticine portraits--and came up with animal, human & hero portraits in 2-D and a 3-D scene too!

It was a fun way to work our own way through a Barbara Reid project from her site, and use the medium she has mastered as a world-renowned illustrator. 

WE started by drawing in our sketchbooks, and using our sketchbooks to figure out some ideas, and then details, of how a thing looks.

We stayed open to imaginative identification, representing animals and heroes as our idea of 'portrait' (7-8yrs.). E. worked through the challenges of representing an actual visage of features, and laying out the background first, unlike the jr. artists, which then inspired and influenced her colour choices. (12 yrs.) (Top of page. Finished to be posted shortly).

After we realized the project, I think the activity of forming shapes and dimensional detail, in different colours, led us into drawing detail and exploring colour combinations in painting(Painting to be posted shortly. Sketching below:)

IKEA frames (on sale!) are a good finish for plastecine 2-D work as they seal in oily plasticine and the colours compliment the bright clay.

ArtClub continues...

Avatars by DMW 2013

Splattered PA DAY Fun!

Some of us calmly working after our Splatter Fest!

An excerpt from our beautiful drop cloth.

Halton PD Days All Ages All Day ArtClub!

Halton PD Days Art Making Fun!!
is available for the following days 2013/2014:

Nov. 22nd:  Drips, Drops and Swirls: Act out
our Weather with Action Painting and
other artful action experiments!
(This will get messy!)
Jan 31:  Discover and Create: Sculpt, paint, embellish and enrobe with fur and fabric, while exploring a Winter palette of forms and colour!
June 6: Discover and Create: Build and create kinetic sculpture...and kinetic drawing too!! Using shapes, colours and sounds too - of early Summer!

$48. All materials included
9-4 pm with am/pm extended care available($6)

Please book ahead to confirm a spot! Email or call Sylvie at 905-639-8545.

Updates and News

Awesome Maché-ing Mask Making and Paper Clackers to make!

Great job with power paper-maché!! We will have great bases  to build our masks from next week.

Here is a link to the instructions for our "Chompers"... it's a Youtube made by kids for kids!

Our "Chompers" are great puppets - we used 60lb card stock. They make great sounds when they chomp, are great at picking things up...and sometimes eat things as well! We enjoyed making up games and ways for our beaks to speak and play - it was very mechanical fun! 

Thanks for a fun and messy studio--still peeling the glue off my hands ;) --we'll build up features and attach handles to our masks next Wednesday.

Tamara Clammer’s Swan Lake Headdresses : Our first session for Fall 2013

Artists at Work #1: Tamara Clammer’s Swan Lake Headdresses

http://www.jigsawrenaissance.org/2013/03/tamara-clammers-swan-lake-headdresses

 It was a lot of work getting the studio ready for new, and returning friends.  Thank you for messing it right up again in the best way with painting and pencil shavings and your work on the walls!  We are a small group but perhaps more friends can join us soon!

We worked on mismatched creatures - drawing from our imagination and nature books, then took our ideas to canvas and acrylic paint - which we'll finish next week. I see some really interesting starts to(inspiration for) our masks/creature characters in our paintings! We also talked about 'performances': and we decided we want to tell stories...and that our stories will be creative inventions even if they refer to stories we already know,that they can no sense, but that our stories will help us to create character masks that will  help tell them...and that we will figure out how to collaborate (work together) on that.

It was a fun first studio for this Fall - Thanks for your enthusiasm!

http://teacupmilliner.com/design/mirror-mirror-movie-swan-headdress/