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 I asked the kids to make book covers. What book was up to them, and what age. I showed them some examples, and we talked about what makes a good cover, how you need to match the font to the style and content of the book, how book covers indicate for what age they are meant etc. And then of course, some weren’t satisfied with just a cover and made a whole book! Some of our older children wanted instead to…
This week I showed the kids message art – that is art that uses text to convey a message, usually a political one, often using photomontage. The artists we looked at included Barbara Kruger, Russian constructivists such as Alexandr Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, and Hannah Hoch. The children of course didn’t have to go political, and some were more comical, such as Leonardo’s ‘Never give up’ which was left unfinished, as if the he had given up – I assure you this was…
This week I took inspiration from a painting by my grandmother, who was also an artist. She often worked with text, and in this painting she painted her letters in transparent layers so that the colours change when they overlap. The kids used coloured acetate to create a similar effect and, understandably for some, the technique suggested pictures or patterns rather than text.
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…
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…