mixed media focusing on negative space

The Wednesday afternoon class has a large number of new students and so I wanted a project that would give me a chance to learn a little more about each child.

In my mind I call it their visually personalities.

Which child is shy, insecure, outgoing, cautious, exuberant, reckless, on and on it goes, when it comes to sharing themselves visually.

You get the idea.

So I wanted the project to not be threatening for anyone. A project where the end result was wide open and definitely did not need to look like something from real life as I observed how each child took on the task at hand.

It was also great for me to see the growth of the kids who have been coming to class for some time too! How they now tackle open ended projects differently from when they first started coming to the studio.

I'm quite excited about all I learned about the students in the class when going forward to create projects.

For this project, I first had the girls just experiment with watercolor. All I asked them to do was create a wet on wet blob of colors.

Mix them together, splatter water on top of color, add some white liquid acrylic, just watch what happens and have some fun.

This showed me a lot about each child in itself. Some kids filled the page immediately and then filled it some more. Others wanted to control each stroke of the brush.

As they finished, we dried the colors with a blow dryer so we could continue on with the next step.

Which was to find object shapes in the blobs of color.

Wait. What?

The idea they could do anything was frightening to all but one artist.

And so I asked them to find some flower shapes. They didn't have to be "normal" shapes, they could be funny circles, flowers shaped from side angles, how about some leaves, could they find a vase?

(and the one child who wanted to draw what she saw in her blobs asked for confirmation she could draw anything instead of flowers and so I assured her that she could in fact draw absolutely anything)

I gave each child a pencil to lightly traces these shapes and when done, a bit of white acrylic paint to paint the negative space around the shapes.

Wait. What?

So after showing them a few times what I meant, they began to paint the negative space.

Again some of the students were "all in" as others struggled with the idea of things not looking like they should.

As the white was completed, they again took the blow dryer to the paper to speed up the drying process.

Then I gave them fountain pens and colored ink and asked them to add details to their shapes.  Line, circles, whatever they wanted to create interest.  They could paint in additional flowers and stems if they wanted.

Everything was free game.

Now this was quite eye opening for me because those children who had embraced each step before were now unsure. Fountain pens do not always offer immediate gratification. They require patience. They require the artist to take their time.

They provided me with great insight when I began to replace fountain pens with black permanent markers as tolerance for the time consuming fountain pens began to hit critical mass.

In the end, I love the finished works. Not because they are pretty pictures but because they taught me a lot about the students.

And I absolutely love how each project captures the unique personality of the child. I'm looking forward to the upcoming weeks of working with these talented students.