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Our students started off the first week of the summer program with Logan, using group drawing and movement exercises about birds and flocking to think about our dynamics as a group and various drawing techniques. We wanted to get to know the students interests more and start thinking of our class as a group: how and why do we move together? We had also planned to use flocking as a big idea, but pivoted when the number of students per class was too low!
We watched videos of different flocks of birds and did some free drawing based on their movements. Next, we took specific birds and drew a freehand portrait of it using a more realistic drawing by John James Audubon. Then, we traced a drawing from the projector straight onto the paper. Comparing the drawings, we could see the spectrum from abstract to realistic forms.
Pointillism
Pointillism
Zach took over the class in the second week, and continuing our exploration of birds and mark-making, we learned about pointillism as a technique to create new forms and mix colors. We drew swallows with this technique, based on an Audubon drawing.
Just like a flock (of birds, of sheep) creating abstract forms in movement, pointillism can be a mix of abstract and realistic. We also looked at the work of Vincent Van Gogh, Georges Seurat, and Miguel Endara as examples of pointillism, how a drawing changes based on how close or far you are from it, and its dreamlike quality and feeling.
Each class included some embodied exercises to warm up our bodies and minds. Sometimes we shared our favorite stretches, sometimes a flash round of Simon Says. We tried a few flocking exercises where the person in front is the leader of the movement and everyone behind follows, but the leader changes to a new person by turning the group so that another person is in front.
We closed our eyes and laid in a sound bath to experiment with dreaming. We dreamt of ourselves in a dream scene, some environment that we imagined deeply. Then we used pointillism to draw ourselves in that scene.
[The sound bath was a recording by Rena Anakwe (A Space for Sound)]
Images coming soon!
We used another line drawing technique of never picking the marker and drawing each color using only one line. We talked about Frida Kahlo's self-portraits, why she painted herself and what she included in her portraits.
Next it was time to make our own self-portraits. We took photos of our own faces, hands, feet, and each other in the garden. Not everyone wanted to take images of their face, so any part of the body worked as a portrait.
We traced some parts of our selfies using the projector on large sheets of paper, then used pointillism and other types of marks to fill in the outlines.
We introduced different materials gradually, like markers, crayons, charcoal, and collage.
We learned about collage techniques and cut images that were intriguing to us from magazines, pasting them onto our portraits as another way to fill in the outlines and give our portraits more personality.
EXHIBITION DAY
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