Thanks for a fun session!

To finish sharing this session I am including S.'s Robot - so determined!!

 And our great sign: how artists say "Thank-you!"

...and a random selection from sketchbooks:  (more to come)

zombie

 monkey friends

ArtClub Selfies

 

These are a great invention by D. and V.
They could become a chain

of friends, a classroom or collaborative group...
like Instagram in real paint:

This:

   

became this:

 

This is my example of random technique for inspiration.
I tend to resist projects led through another artist's style, including my own(!!), but we looked briefly at work by Warhol and Chuck Close for Art History permission to consider our photo-likeness in self-portrait.

ArtClub for Feb.18th: Masking, layering, fields of colour and foreground

We did a great job exploring the watercolours.  We talked about backgrounds and creating foreground images, and how to work resist, wet-on-wet, wet-on-dry, and dry-on-wet too!  You took your time to discover an idea and then work it out without a sketch or a plan, and the results were very colourful, animated and deliberate. We also talked about background and foreground as elements in each of your work. Here are a few examples...(sorry if yours isn't here..I will check my other camera for the rest!!)

 

Helen Frankenthaler was a colour field artist. Here is an image of one of her works(cited below.) And a link: https://www.artsy.net/artist/helen-frankenthaler/works

Helen Frankenthaler Fiesta, 1973
Acrylic on paper
22 ^1/4 × 30 ^1/4 in
56.5 × 76.8 cm
Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

ArtClub for Feb.11: Color, contrast, shape, symbol

We did well working out ideas of contrast in colour and in black & white. It was fun to see your ideas about self-expression as we 'exploded'  our Heart symbol.

Our group doodle was fun and we decided it doesn't need colour after all.

I think you all had a lot of fun making mini-movies with the camera - we can revisit that later.

ArtClub for Feb.4th: Starting with choices and goals

It was a fun first studio, with new friends in 2 distinct age groups.  I am looking forward to our conversations around our work!

We started our Painting and Photography Session with free painting with some drawing - talking about what we want to "express" or "represent" using pastel and acrylic....and a bit of liquid water colour.  Moving from black and white paint, we added colours and created hues(colour mixed with white) or shades (colour mixed with black).  We looked a the tripod and learned how to attach the camera.

(I will post week 1 work here shortly.)

We started a group drawing that I will keep up for next week's studio. We will take silly face photos next studio, and have a chance to draw in our sketchbooks and paint again.

We will make character paintings for our final project.  This is very open ended and I am excited to see what we all come up with.

PaDay Art day on Jan. 30th and ArtClub AfterSchool is on Winter Break until Feb.4th

Just a note to say that we have a PA Day Art day coming up - Friday, January 30th. Please sign up by Jan. 28th  if you are interested in joining us. Please also note that we need a minimum of 4 artists to run this month's art day.  We will be connecting popular culture and Chinese-Canadian culture by exploring colours, symbols, and different New Year traditions using painting, graphic lettering(think graffiti to invent your own symbol) and some very cool clay sculpture using my new favourite sculpting material: Critter Clay!  If we have time, we will make a short video too!

Thanks for asking!:) ArtClub AfterSchool is on a Winter Break but will start again on Wed.Feb 4 for 5 weeks(running to March 4th). This next session will find artists working with digital cameras and exploring painting.  Hope to see you there!!

MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON

Props:  www.deanfleischercamp.com

Starring Jenny Slate as Marcel

Directed by Dean Fleischer-Camp

Written by Jenny Slate & Dean Fleischer-Camp
Marcel has a beautifully illustrated book!: http://www.amazon.com/Marcel-Shell-Wi...

Uploaded to YouTube on Oct 15, 2010

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.