Brainstorm!

Wow, it's been hard to post lately between all the teaching -- but it's yielding some great insights!

For example:

Brainstorming. I know, it's a word we're used to hearing in Corporate America - but it's a wonderful thing to do with kids. I use brainstorming to create lots of ideas that kids can then use, steal from, borrow, or ignore.

Today we brainstormed a bunch of adjectives, then a bunch of nouns. Then we picked from the lists to create things to draw. Weird things. Like, a gigantic metal banana.

Then, we brainstormed lists of superpowers, types of sidekicks, parts of a superhero costume, and other stuff. I left it on the board for people to use -- if they wanted to. A lot of them did something totally different, but having lots of ideas flying around really got the pencils going.

I did this in a room of 18 kids... so it was loud, and funny, and chaotic. I happen to think these are signs of success in a class. I always figure I'm doing things right if I'm having to calm the kids down periodically.

Anyway, you can brainstorm with just a couple of people, or by yourself, or in a big group. Just please don't break into discussion groups or do a mission statement or anything like that. For kids, it's a terrific way to get them talking, yelling, and getting ideas.

How to Do Group Art With Kids

Never underestimate the power of drawing to give kids connections with one another. I love to take a big white board and lay it flat, and then divide it into sections and turn kids loose. Group projects often get everybody talking, and there's negotiation as to who is working on which section. Sometimes they talk about what they are drawing, sometimes they are just gossiping or free associating.

If kids are going to work together, you may need to set some ground rules such as outlawing marking on someone else's drawing. Also, you'll want to allow lots of space so battles for spots don't break out. I find this circular arrangement shown in the picture works well, because the kids can approach it from any side. And, some can stay longer while others do a drive-by and then come back later to add something else. The result is always fascinating, and I can look at these for a long time. It's also fun to hang on to them for a while and let the kids appreciate the whole thing too.

How to Create a Gazillion Characters

One of my favorite things to do with a new group of kids is to brainstorm a whole bunch of words and then use them to generate ideas. This week I taught a drawing camp at my son's school.
I don't know if you can see this too well, but what we did was to think of a whole bunch of nouns that were creatures of some kind - and wrote them on index cards. Then the kids would pick two cards, and draw the result. We got things like a mer-panda, a gangster cow, a monkey chicken, and lots of others. For some kids, this bloomed into a whole society of characters. For others, one quickly became a favorite. They got names, personalities, and even relationships.
Later on I took one of mine, "Gangster Cow," and turned him into a sort of bad guy who was going after another student's creation, "Laser Man."
Then as another twist, you can create another set of cards that has places or adjectives and mix them in. One good combination of cards is Adjective + Adjective + Noun. Another is Noun goes to Place. As you can see, there are a whole lot of combinations. And, kids can run the game themselves. I really enjoy watching the whole thing take on its own life.

Women Impressionists

This weekend I went to see the Women Impressionists Exhibit at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. It incorporates the work of four very different female Impressionist painters. I was struck by how distinct they were from one another, and by the absolutely impeccable drawing skills that were evident underneath and inside of every painting.

When we got up close to the first painting my daughter asked her usual question: "Mom, is that the ACTUAL thing?" To which I replied, "Yes, that's the real painting. Her hands actually put those brush strokes on there." To which she replied, "Woa." Or something like that.

Every time we go to an exhibit I am struck by how, in this day and age, it is so common to see media and copies of things and digital stuff that it's easy to "see" something in some media form without ever getting the chance to appreciate it as an object, as the work of someone's hands.

There is a wonderful book called "What Painting Is" by James Elkins. It is all about the physical act of making a painting - what happens to the canvas, how the paints are mixed, how paintings are taken apart and put in different frames and moved around. It makes you wish you could see the backs of all those paintings hanging in the museum. What stories are hidden there!

Cool Video Drawing Demonstration

Okay, while I firmly believe that there is no substitute for studying real-life objects to learn to draw them, especially people and hands, I also think there's no substitute for watching someone work. So, here's a nice video on a particular way of drawing hands - one of those elements that drive people crazy.

Neat Online Drawing Thingy

http://www.imaginationcubed.com/

I don't know why this is there, or what GE has to do with it, but there it is. And it's pretty fun. If you feel like just drawing something quick, it's great. Shoot, if you had an idea and wanted to shoot a friend a sketch of what you're thinking, you could use this to do it. Hover over Tools to get a stamper or text thing or to change the background.

Cool!

Intentions for This Summer

This summer will be exciting, since I'm teaching in one-, two-, and three-hour formats. I'm doing a weeklong cartooning camp, a series of long workshops, and a bunch of short workshops. All at different venues with different kids.

My plan for the summer has a few simple elements:
1. Have a theme for each week and use it at all my classes, regardless of format. This way I can put together materials and use them multiple times. My themes are going to include superheroes and sidekicks, fairytales and monsters, lost in space, the zoo, and surf and skate. Each theme offers cool ideas like movie posters, or designing a skateboard.
2. Follow the same basic pattern for the classes, just make it longer or shorter. First, I like to goof around and play some games. Then we talk about the theme/project. Then, we brainstorm together (this is often the funnest part, kids yelling out crazy ideas and me writing them down). Then, we do a project together, and then I set them loose on their own stuff.
3. Then, I always have some random inspirations and projects in my back pocket - a cool art or animation book, or a paper-folding idea. Often the kids have their own suggestions like fortune tellers or checkerboards.

I'm looking forward to posting artwork and lessons learned as all this stuff unravels (I mean, unfolds!) - and hopefully you'll find lots of project ideas too as we go.

If You Want to Write (or Draw or Sing or...)

I just finished this book by Brenda Ueland. She was a prolific writer and a teacher - and this book, though written way back in 1938, is often cited as the best book on creativity and the artistic spirit that you can read. I think this book can be life-changing. If you are either pondering your own creative path or are someone who inspires and teaches others, this book is a very important one. There are many books out there about creativity, including some that I will highlight here, but at the core many of them are re-stating what's in this book. This is one you want to stash in your nightstand.

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 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.

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!

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/

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.

Great use of Animation - The Story of Stuff

I just finished watching this 20 minute presentation on "The Story of Stuff." It does a great job explaining where all our consumer stuff comes from, and why it happens that way. I think many kids can absorb this information -- mainly because it's supported with really simple, straightforward animation. In fact, it's so simple most people could probably draw most of the figures themselves.

So, watch this with your family - both for the information in it, and for the simple style that's used to show the information. You don't have to be Pixar to make great animation or to use animation to tell a great story.

A Good Book: Drawing on the Right Side of The Brain

This book has been around for a very long time. It's a great book for showing how drawing involves a simple set of skills and it lets you try and practice each one individually. You can get this at Amazon too, and it also has a workbook if you're into putting all your stuff in a fancy workbook. But paper works fine too.

Betty Edwards likes to take adult learners and teach them how to make "good" drawings, which can seem a little like a gimmick. But it's not - she's really interested in helping people reach new areas of their minds. I think that's the best thing about her book: it emphasizes the "right brain" state of drawing, where you stop being verbal and go into a mode of creating visually. I see this with students all the time, and I adapt my materials and activities to help it happen.

Again, if you're one of my students, I can loan this to you...

A Good Book: Understanding Comics

Scott McCloud has written a number of books on making comics, but his best one remains this one: "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art." It's a really nice explanation of how a comic gets put together and why it works. You can get it on Amazon.

Or, if you're one of my students, I can loan you my copy - if you give it back...

More about the Funky Diagram Part 1

As I mention in my previous post, asking good questions means changing your perspective, and seeing something in a fresh way to get your imagination moving.


For example, cognitive psychologist Abigail Housen and museum educator Philip Yenawine developed something called Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS). This is a very simple way of looking at art and asking questions about what you see. It reveals a lot about how different people can look at the same thing and have different reactions. You can learn more about it here.


While VTS is aimed mainly at art in museums, I'd like to take it a step further and use it to look at advertisements. We are so covered in media and messages and SELLING these days it's hard to know where one ad starts and another one stops. And to me, teaching about art also means teaching about how to look at all the stuff that comes into our field of view with smart, savvy eyeballs.


So, here's something to try. Grab a magazine, and turn to an advertisement.


Now, answer these questions:

1. What is going on in this ad?

2. What do you see that makes you say that?

3. What else do you see?

4. Go back to #1 and repeat. Keep at it until you feel like you've given the ad the once-over.


Now that you've taken a really good look at the ad, you can try these questions from Common Sense Media:

1. Who made this ad?

2. Who did they make it for?

3. How does it get your attention (sizes of things, colors, pictures etc.)?

4. What is the message of the ad?

5. How does it communicate the message (pictures, words, celebrities, etc.)?


Asking good questions can turn you from a passive consumer to a smart, savvy, creative thinker and problem solver.

A couple of pointers:
- There are no right answers to the questions above - it's all about revealing what people see.
- Little kids will come up with really random answers to these sometimes! This can be great fun - and very enlightening as to how our ad-saturated world really looks to them.
- If you have more than one person looking, be sure to notice that everyone has their own answers and that's okay too.

Me and my Funky Diagram

I have a funky round diagram that I use to remind me of four things that encourage creative thinking and problem solving. Those are:

1. How to Ask Good Questions

2. How to Discover Answers

3. How to Think on Your Feet

4. How to Communicate to Others

It looks like this:

Okay, mine actually has a lot more stuff written all over it, and the overall result is a big thing that makes you go, "Huh?" But it's really helpful to me.

Most of the games and projects that I come up with address one or more of these areas. So, in the next few posts I'm going to take each of the 4 parts and explain it a little better, with examples and challenges for you.