BIG paintings

This is the last workshop in a youth series created by the North Vancouver Community Arts Council. Today the students painted very large paintings.  They literally took the entire two hours to paint from beginning to end.

Budget constraints made buying large canvas too expensive so corrugated cardboard was gessoed for the kids to make their masterpieces and it worked out great. I had a quick discussion with the kids that anything is free game to paint on and that artist, like Van Gogh, did a lot of their creations on cardboard and surfaces other than traditional canvas or paper.

Here are a couple of pictures to give you a sense of the size of the cardboard.

They could pick any subject matter of their choosing. I had brought in some reference for winter landscape scenes which were completely uninteresting to all of them.  Although three of the four works ended up with snow.....

The purple dogs were inspired by the white t shirt of one of the students.  These particular two girls are good friends and for the most part one follows the other when deciding what to paint.   The dragon was inspired by the students' wallet and the snowman? Well, it is December after all.

For the three who did winter scenes, once they were finished I showed them how to splatter white paint over the top to create snowflakes.  All three really enjoyed that and we had white paint everywhere.  I believe more than one of them walked out of class with "snowflakes" on their face and necks.

For the dogs, I let the girls use the charcoal again at the end to bring back some of their detail lines.  They had use charcoal to sketch directly on the cardboard at the beginning to draw and just rubbed out if they didn't like something.

I think they all walked out happy with the results.  Although they needed help carrying them since the works of art were almost bigger than they were!