Did you know that although palette knives were used for centuries to mix paint it’s thought that it wasn’t until Rembrandt that artists actually thought to use them to apply the paint to the canvas? I suppose until then painters required the greater control that a paintbrush could give them, and the rough, scratchy marks a palette knife could give were not so interesting. More fool them I say because palette knives are amazing painting tools, as we demonstrated this week! Palette knives…
For the last week of term I decided to showcase all that the kids had learned about fonts, text and design and give them the freedom to promote any cause they wanted. They could make a placard (complete with cardboard stick!) or a poster, using paint, marker pens and/or collage. We had some brilliant designs, slogans,and causes, both earnest and joking.
This week we looked into writing/drawing comics/graphic novels. We discussed how they manage to combine words and text together to create something that is more than the sum of it’s parts. I showed them how really the action in a comic happens between the boxes – the gutter – and in the imagination of the reader as the comics can only portray still images. But these still images can also use various tricks to convey movement – from movement lines, blurred images, blurred…
This week I introduced the kids to asemic writing – that is wriiting which has no intelligible meaning. It looks like script, or ideograms, with specific characters but yet those characters do not correspond to any actual symbols – hence the word asemic – non-signs. It’s amazing what can be conveyed trough signs, without those signs meaning anything – they are always full of energy and emotion. I came across this through the work of Henri Michaux. He was really interested in different…
This week we we did block printing by sticking foam letters onto small pieces of wood. We then rolled printing ink onto them, stamped them and then repeated this several times to make a pattern. This could become a monogram but I also encouraged the kids to see the letters as simply shapes, rather than letters, and to see what kind of patterns they could create with them.Some even managed to make pictures with their letters!
The theme for this term’s classes is text. Artists have used text in a wide variety of ways, and not always legibly. Think of Picasso’s use of newspapers in his collages, or Michaux’s development of asemic writing (week 2). Of course then there is illustration which uses text as the inspiration and comic books which marry words and images to create something else. We will look at all these are more during this term. For our first session we focused on inventing our…
At the end of every summer term Art Class London puts on an exhibition of the work of all the students who attend our classes, young and old, experienced and beginners. We also have a private view – i.e. a party! Here are some pictures of the kids’ work on display.
We were tying ourselves in knots this week – intentionally, and imaginatively. Different knots and folds, around different objects (such as small stones and lolly sticks), and with different ties (elastic bands or cable ties) created different and amazing effects. In order to ensure the dye is reasonably colourfast – i.e. the dye won’t all run out in the wash – I soaked the fabric (100% cotton) in soda ash first. You could add soda ash to the dye instead but this means…
