...Kid Art...

Hallo buddies! I love to watch students develop creative skills, and when I say creative I don't mean hours and hours of pencil drawing and shading (which is an important skill but for young people is creatively very limiting, but sadly is still used in schools A LOT and frustrates the crapola out of me as I have to teach it!). I would much rather be helping them to make creative choices about layers, lettering, colour, placement, composition, style, materials etc...which I get to do luckily with my Textiles Design students. I have a Year 11 group just finishing, a Year 10 group about to start their first major coursework piece, and two Year 9 groups (although they do half Textiles Design and half Textiles Technology...very technical but just means creative-textiles or product-design-textiles). The work I am showing you today comes from a Year 9er. She lacks confidence most of the time, gets frustrated ALL the time, but inbetween creates utter masterpieces that are a joy to behold. I love to look though her sketchbook so thought you might like to too.

This is part of a regular feature (yep I just decided this as I type) called Kidart, where I showcase student work that I like and think you will enjoy too :)

This girl is 13. I couldn't have made these kind of brave marks at that age! She doesn't even realise the choices she has made, it is natural to her. In a sense she's just doodling, but some pretty hot doodling if you ask me.
What was your art education like at school?

Kid-art

My students make some amazing work sometimes. Not a day goes by that I am not blown away by the marks they make, the connections they discover or the techniques they master. Of course, they don't listen to me on it, prefer instead to think things happen as a 'fluke', or are in fact 'rubbish'. Try as I might, young people find it hard to see what I see in their work.

These are taken from a worksheet called 'Artist Study' in which we look at and draw from Artist work. The theme of the project is Cityscapes.

I love the difference between the fragile marks, the ghostly shapes and the vivid explosions depending on which artist is being studied. We looked at: Edward Hopper, Jacob Dahlgren, Canaletto, Chris Burden, Ball&Nogues and Rachel Whiteread.

Now I must stop messing about on here (my favorite waste of time), as it is Valentines Eve and I have just had a phone call for a rush-job commission for tomorrow... away to the sewing machine *poof*

Love, me x