Summer Art Camp, Week 3 of 5

7/23/2017

Week 3 featured two classes. The morning session was cartooning (Evidently I am now a character) and the afternoon was "CrAzY Art" where we do many things that are generally discouraged in school. Our catch-phrase is "Create art that will make people doubt your sanity!"

Cartooning is pretty straight forward. First we create a list of eyes, noses, mouths, head shapes, etc, then roll dice to build characters. Then we do comic strips on copy paper I preprint with cells. Next we do a comic book cover, this time using foam dots to raise some elements in relief. As they finish that we do flip book animations.

We finished the week with old fashioned animation cells in the Disney method. Students created a background scene, drew a character, traced it with sharpie, colored on the back with acrylics, and gave it a final coat of white to make it opaque.

CrAzY Art Week is always intense as we try to manage the potential mess. Every time I have run this class, it's full, so kids love the chance to experiment. Every day however starts the same, I call it the "Daily Canvas." Each day we did a different painting technique, let it dry, added a layer of masking tape, and painted again. Every day for 4 days. We unwrapped our paintings on the 5th day revealing these awesome abstract works.

1. Alcohol and watered down acrylics
2. Pour Paintings
3. "Clean" fingerpainting (Paint under plastic wrap)
4. Bubble printing

Another project involved students wrapping their left foot in plastic wrap, stepping in acrylic paint, and walking around a giant canvas. Later this canvas was cut up and used to make portfolio bags for all the work to go home. The girls taught the boys how to braid their handles from yarn.

Color Theory & Sports Cards: We painted block-out white on the players only, then colored in their bodies to match background colors and textures, making them "invisible." We kept the shadows to give a hint about what we had done.

They really enjoyed "defacing" collector items and making people "invisible." By the end, they were really great at mixing subtle shades helping each other make shadows that had a "tint of purple" and other colors. I only made white and primary colors available. They mixed on a sheet of foil.