Starting with a school group workshop I did for Seymour Art Gallery in Deep Cove last month for their Hope Forstenzer exhibit called Stories for Children.
I found it interesting and fun to work with three different school classes, an elementary age group, a LARGE group of kindergartners and a high school group.
The show was just as interesting! Glass blown balloons with characters from stories for children sandblasted onto them. The artist is quite fascinated that we tell children all these stories with really terrifying characters in them and has focused on those characters, both from recent stories and stories told over the centuries, on balloons. Balloons that invite the viewer into the room in a playful, non threatening way, just like the stories that contain these characters, before revealing a more sinister truth.
All the kids were fascinated by them and recognized many of the characters and were anxious to learn about the ones they did not know. Through the discussions they came up with reasons why we tell kids stories with such terrifying things in them. After the discussion, the students all participated in a hands-on workshop inspired by the exhibit.
We modified the project for each age group, but the one common thread was printmaking. The elementary age group made suncatchers with a gelatin monoprint added of a storybook character they liked and the kindergarten group made a stamp from craft foam.
Needless to say, the younger groups made for a very busy hour and so I do not have photos to share, although the works of art were very cute and the kids all had a great time.
But I am quite excited to share the work of the high school group! Their class was in the process of making 3D sculptures of an original story character at school that they created from a writing assignment given in class. The teacher thought the gallery exhibit tour was a nice addition to what was happening in the classroom, so we decided to have the students create a gelatin monoprint of their 3D characters that they could add to their written stories.
I loved listening to their perspective of the exhibit and afterwards they had time to really look at the balloons and the different ways Forstenzer illustrated the characters. Each student spent time in the gallery sketching directly from the balloons to gather ideas on how they could draw their own original characters too.
Then all of them began to work out their character sketches and paint them onto the gelatin plates. The students had access to black and gold ink for painting directly onto the plates.
The results? Amazing!
Now it was my turn to be fascinated by the stories these characters represented as told by the students. I loved the variety of ways they illustrated their characters and the multitude of different kinds of characters represented in their artwork.
This is a wicked princess witch. I love the border surrounding the character, the sense of overgrown, thorny woods it brings to the illustration to give the character an even more ominous presence.
Some of the students had time to create a couple of monoprints and took the opportunity to explore a couple of different ideas for their illustration. I love the way this artist used the pencil eraser to create the circle background in the print.
And I loved seeing how this student played with the idea of adding a background instead of just focusing on the character alone.
Or this set where the student played with pulling away to show the whole character vs a close up.
Some illustrations told a narrative while others just focused on the character itself.
But the best part was at the end, how proud each student was of their work and how excited they were to look at what each other had created and talk about them. It was a great afternoon spent at Seymour Art Gallery and I am quite humbled to have been asked to share in this experience as sixty plus students discovered a really beautiful exhibit.
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