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Drawing & Printing with Style

Arts Education Center, Summer Camp, Summer of New

I just finished two amazing weeks teaching my summer camp, Drawing and Printing with Style. The end goal of the workshop was a melee of screen printed garb…shirts, pillowcases, cardboard, paper, posters, and any other fabrics the kids could convince their parents to print on. I think I bombarded a few un-expecting parents with the abundance of “stuff” their kid had produced on the final day of camp. Each child in the camp was able to concept their own image that they wanted to see in print. Most kids brought shirts for themselves and their family, excited about the prospect of having their drawings wandering around on the bellies of sisters and parents. The kids were astonished when on the first day at camp I explained that their own Dora the explorer and Gap shirts they were wearing were also screen-printed.

Yet, before the magic of screen-printing was realized, the kids had to do a bit of leg-work to get their images to print. Throughout the week, I challenged the kids to look at the world around them, and document the objects that they interact with daily (through drawing and photography). We also discussed why certain objects grabbed our eyes, while others did not.  After this sort of cataloguing took place, we began to use our imaginations to combine some of these objects with fantasy, narrative, or design. The kids made some beautifully absurd group monster drawings…I guess the word “monster” inherently allows us to be completely free and wacky with we draw. So the challenge for the kids then was applying this creative freedom while drawing the objects we had catalogued, while also developing a personal style. A lot to ask of a six year old. Not only did we do all that in five days, but they also learned two methods of printmaking, as well as how to screen print. And these young ones stepped up to the challenge. They were so eager to learn these new skills.

I continually encouraged the kids that they had power to express their world however they please, and was thrilled when I could see the kids latch on to this philosophy. For example one camper, Owen, was conceptualizing his final drawing of a police car at a stoplight. I had him cut out the police car in construction paper, and upon doing this he announced, “Hey…this police car kind of looks like a whale!” After I suggested to him, “Well, you know what Owen, maybe you should turn it into a whale,” he beamed in the most endearing way and said, “Hey, yeah! I’ll make him into a whale. A whale at a stop-sign.” Owen’s freedom in expressing the world around him is exactly the approach I had hoped to impart on the kids, and seeing this attitude in action was an amazing thing.

Watching the kids screen-printing was also breath taking. To be honest I was a bit worried that their images wouldn’t come out, or I would have to go over them myself, but most of the kids just got it! Watching a seven-year-old screen print on their own was pretty mind blowing. Through teaching, I in turn learned so much about the fascinating capabilities and imaginations these young children possess.

Monday, July 27th, 2009 at 4:51 pm and is filed under Arts Education Center, Summer Camp, Summer of New. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.