Stencils are Cool.

I've always loved stencil art. Particularly graffiti. It comes out so graphic and stark and cool. So I'd like to show some here.

Having said that, general searches on Flickr under "street art" and "stencil art" yield some, um, questionable results. Since a lot of street art is political, or violent, or adult. So, I handpicked some examples to look at. I dig these.

R2D2 Stencil

Wall Art

The Clash

Multi-Layer Stencil

Cool Tricky Stencil

These make you think of positive and negative space in a whole new way. Enjoy!

Graphic Novel-ing

coin_door_appears, originally uploaded by betsystreeter.

I thought it might be fun to post what I'm working on periodically - since I'm developing a graphic novel based on a story I wrote some years ago.
It's been a long process determining the layout and how I want to draw it. I've spent a lot of time looking at picture books, comics, graphic novels, and paintings. I've looked at how I tend to like squares and grids based on squares. And I've had to make sure that I love each and every frame - the composition, the story in it, the drawing itself. Because that is how I will make sure that there is truth in every frame and every page. By truth I mean, what is true from my own imagination and abilities to get it on paper.
Each page will work as a mini-story and then they will string together to make the book.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time explaining the plot or characters - instead I'll let the pages speak for themselves. That's what they should be doing, anyway.
Enjoy!

Graphic Novels: The Arrival by Shaun Tan

I am thrilled to see more and more graphic novels taking new directions visually. I have to admit I've never been that into the classic "comic book" style, probably because my own drawing style is much more textured than those are and so I don't relate that well. But there are lots of neat graphic novels out there. This one, "The Arrival," has no words at all. It's a great surrealistic story of the immigrant experience. Shaun Tan creates a world that is impossible to interpret - you can't read the signs, everything looks weird and unfamiliar - and in doing so really drives home what it's like to be an immigrant in a new land. This is a popular theme in this medium - "American Born Chinese" covers some of the same ground. I'll elaborate on that one soon.

The World's Second-Shortest Post on the First Amendment

Okay, let's review - the First Amendment concerns the behavior of the government. Congress shall make no law. It is not about what your neighbor or the comics store down the street do. It says the government may not play the role of telling people what they can and cannot say.

That said, lots of crazy stuff is gonna get published. And it's up to you to decide what to do with that.

The great comics scare of the 1950's happened because of 2 things:
1. The government got into a McCarthy-like tizzy and tried to tell people what they could and could not publish
2. The public themselves were extremely lax about what was being put on the shelves in reach of children for 10 cents a pop.

Neither of these things was the right answer. In a society that values the free flow of ideas, it's up to you to moderate. If you are a parent, it is up to you to help your kids make sense of all this stuff - and turn it off when appropriate. If you are a consumer, it's up to you to pay attention to what you are consuming.

Media literacy is more important than ever. The First Amendment is a cornerstone of our society. People are going to publish crazy garbage and fabulous works of genius. These statements are all true, and we have to deal with it.

The World's Shortest Post on Media and Behavior

Do media affect behavior?

Let me put it this way - if media did not affect behavior, there would be no advertising industry.

So the next time someone tries to tell you that media do not affect the feelings, thoughts and behavior of whoever is seeing and hearing them, child or grownup, just point out that maybe those billions of dollars that advertisers spend must be a complete waste. 'Cause clearly NO ONE has EVER changed what they do based on an advertisement.

Next.

P.S. Excellent Book: The Other Parent by James P. Steyer.

I suppose you could just paint your computer...

A huge amount of what kids get out of art is the sheer messy coolness of it. This is why it's so important to use different materials - switching from pencils to white boards to pens to crayons to whatever else.

It's particularly interesting to take a couple of materials and see how they interact. In this picture, oil pastel was used first and then watercolor paint was put over it. When you use a bright pastel and then a dark watercolor, it looks like the lines are glowing in the dark.

Another thing you can do is write in white crayon on white paper (okay it's a leap of faith 'cause you can't really see what you're doing), and then go over it in colored crayon, ink pen, or watercolor to reveal the "secret" drawing.

So try getting out more than one medium at a time. This is something the computer just can't do for you. Unless of course you want to see how crayon interacts with LCD.

Is Coloring Art?

Yes. Next!

Just kidding. Okay, coloring a picture that is already drawn does not require creating shapes, or lines, or developing an idea from scratch. However, it's one of the quickest and easiest ways to foster a right-brain shift that I know of. Meaning, it can kick you into a peaceful, non-verbal, quiet sense of well-being as you interact with something that is purely visual.

I often draw things for kids to color. When my daughter was very small I would draw something for her, and she would basically obliterate it with a crayon as she went over it again and again - sometimes following the lines, sometimes coloring it in.

Online there are pretty much infinite things for kids to color - if your child has a favorite character, I guarantee there's a coloring page out there with that character on it. Just Google Dora or Arthur or Sesame Street or whatever and bingo.

Also, the newspaper funnies are a great thing to color. It's like having a coloring book delivered to your house every morning.

And again - if you don't want to drown in coloring pages, you can make an outline of something on a small white board and let kids color it in. There are even white board marker-friendly placemats that kids can color while they eat their cereal. My son has the Solar System.

So don't underestimate the value of interacting with a drawing by coloring it - many times a child is following the lines, getting to know the shapes, and encoding things in muscle memory. In full color!

Is Teaching Art Buddhist?

A lot of the time when I am drawing with kids I feel like I am looking for things that are already there... and offering a way for them to come out and be seen.

This is a very Buddhist notion - the notion that what we need to do is release our essential nature in order to be free.

Art teaching is very two-sided that way - on the one hand, it's often helpful to offer tools and techniques so that students can get control of what they put on the paper. This fosters a sense of confidence, and makes art part of the self-expression toolbox.

On the other side of art teaching, though, is the practice of encouragement and allowing whatever comes out to be valid. This is where I spend a lot of my effort. While I have gotten more directive over time as I've gained experience teaching different age groups, I still err on the side of self-expression over technique. I think that young kids need above all to feel safe expressing themselves, in whatever way they see fit. This helps them keep from developing unhealthy mental blocks later, and offers them a place to put all their angst when they become teenagers. Or college students. Or middle managers. Or archaeologists. Or whatever.

And, I firmly believe that you don't have to be "good" for drawing to be a valuable thing for you to do. We don't tell people that because they are not Mark Twain they are not good enough to express themselves in writing - we view verbal expression as a core part of our being. This is how I look at drawing as well. You don't have to be Picasso to hold a pencil.

The trick is to know when to offer technique and when to let the pens fly. Some of this has to do with the time of day, whether the kids have eaten lately, and whether it's hot or cold outside.

So, when I say "unleash the creative beast," while that's cute with my friend's puppy and all that, I'm actually referring to the Buddhist notion of letting out our nature and embracing it. Pretty deep eh?

Another Cool Comic Creator!

This one is from The Funny Times, a national humor publication that has published my stuff since the early 90's. So I love them. They rock.

They tend more toward social/political humor so there are various politicians' bodies and heads you can match up. Very entertaining!

http://www.funnytimes.com/playground/

Cool Tool: Comic Creator Online

One of my students showed me a comic he had made with this. It's pretty fun!

I think one of the benefits of using it is that it makes you think about all the various things that make up a comic - characters, speech, backgrounds, etc. -- and also asks you to decide how many frames you want to use. These can be kind of stumbling blocks for a kid just trying out cartooning, so this is a nice way to experiment.

I also like the way the backgrounds introduce a horizon line so you can experiment with making things look closer and farther away.

http://www.readwritethink.org/materials/comic/

Don't Eat/Read/Watch that Junk!

I'm reading a really interesting book right now called "The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America."

I haven't finished it, but I'm at the part where kids in schools are burning piles of comic books.

It's all about how comic books got accused of fomenting all sorts of misdeeds in the nation's youth in the middle of the last century. And while reading this, something occurred to me: media is like food.

I love media. I love movies, and TV shows, and books, and radio, and DVDs, and the Internet. And I would argue that just about everybody likes food.

Problem is, there's food that's good for you and there's food that's bad for you. We expend enormous amounts of energy teaching our kids how to eat. What to eat, how much, what not to eat, Sesame Street songs about "any time foods" vs. "sometime foods,"... etc. Sometimes this gets to the point of encouraging the opposite of what we want in eating behavior when we try too hard or treat food like a reward.

Well, media is the same way. There are things that are appropriate for different ages. There are things that one kid likes and that terrify another kid. But most of all, we have to learn how to be consumers of media the same way we learn to consume food. Not all of it is good, and you need some basic judgment to know what you are dealing with.

To help with this, I recommend this website: Commonsense Media. It's a place where you can get reviews of new movies, find out what's going on with pop culture, and just be a savvy consumer so you can teach your kids to do the same.

It's just plain dumb to think burning piles of comic books, or records, or whatever is going to solve anything. The minute you tell one person what can or cannot be said, that's a crack in our free society. But you can be smart about media "nutrition" and help kids have a healthy relationship with it all.

Cool Project Idea: Play it Again!

This picture shows a bunch of paintings of the same subject: a rose. What's cool here is that each painting is made using some different kind of "brush." The artist (who is 6) first made the one in the lower row, second from right, using a brush. She wasn't happy with that one for some reason, so I asked her, "What don't you like about it?" She said she didn't like the shape of the flower. So I suggested, "Why don't you try painting it again using something different?" This touched off a process that resulted in a pile of paintings, each one interesting and fun in its own way. She painted with a rubber band, a Lego, a leaf, a rose petal, her finger, a piece of cloth, a crumpled up piece of paper... and that really abstract one was made with one of those pens that wraps around into a bracelet.
Sometimes painting or drawing with something other than a brush or pencil can take the artist one step away from being too critical of the outcome. Working with weird stuff is fun in and of itself, and it frees the artist up and quiets criticism.
I also love the way the basic rose shape gets repeated over and over. And she reinterpreted it a bit with each new "brush."
The key things here I think are keeping the subject simple, and allowing strange things to be used as a brush. Oh, and using washable paint.

Another great fun site: The Toymaker

This site is just full of projects that you can print out and make. Her artwork is fabulous, but what's also cool is that the projects are formatted so that you can print them out and add your own touches. I like the little tiny books, for example. Enjoy!

Who cares about the food, how are the placemats?

I think restaurants are on to something. Now, being a person with kids means I eat at a lot of restaurants that hand out crayons when you sit down. Sometimes they also give you a puzzle, or a maze, and sometimes the kids' menu is in there somewhere. But the expectation is, there's gonna be drawing during dinner.

Even when we go to the nice restaurants, if they've got paper placemats, those are going to be drawn on. I'll pull out pencils and let the kids go for it.

Well, we've adopted this habit at home, too. We keep a cup of pencils or a package of pens on the table pretty much all the time. I used to think it was because I was really bad at getting the table cleared before dinner - now I realize that I'm doing that on purpose.

Having paper and pencils available is soothing. It accommodates the desire to just sit and make marks. I know many people like there to be a certain decorum at the table, and we do expect people to say "please" and sit on their chairs in between squirming.

But I find this blending of drawing and eating to be really interesting on a lot of levels. I hear from parents of older kids that it's easier to have a conversation with their child when he or she slightly distracted - maybe the TV is on, or you're driving somewhere - anything that is not a full-frontal conversation assault.

Sometimes thoughts flow more smoothly with my younger kids, too, when they have a pencil in their hand. We can talk about their day, or ask questions, and it's a little less stressful. I haven't done clinical studies here, I'm just offering an observation.

Maybe that's why all those old master painters did so many pictures of food.