Sock Puppets Rule.

The next time someone gives you a hard time about losing all the matches to your socks, just make a puppet. Then put on a show. Nobody will give you a hard time any more.
Here are some tips:
1. Put the sock on your NON-writing hand to decorate it (example - if you are right-handed, put the sock on your LEFT hand), so you can see how the sock fits and so you can use your writing hand to do the work. Or, you can stuff the sock with crumpled newspaper to make it poof out while you decorate it.
2. Use white glue, and press everything on firmly.
3. When you want to get the sock off your hand to let it dry (or just rest between performances), pull it by the nose, gently.
4. And of course, as the example shows, you can never have too many googly eyes on your sock puppet. Googly eyes also rule.

Drawing What You See

Do you draw what something looks like in real life, or do you draw what you THINK it should look like?
It's hard to draw what is in front of you, because the lines that make up something often don't look like anything at all. The edge of a table is just a slanted line. A person's face is really squiggly and weird looking.
Try this: Pick something, like your hand, or a flower, or something in your house. Put it in front of you. Now, try to draw the outline of it EXACTLY as you see it. Just follow the lines, wherever they go. Don't try to draw a thing, just draw lines. You may be surprised at what you get.

Make Your Own Super - Potato?

Superheroes, sidekicks, villains, and giant battles to save the galaxy are cool. Everybody knows that. So what do you need to make your own? Well, anything you want.

For example, a group of kids and I recently started with nothing more than a potato. A Potatosaurus, to be exact. Which was basically a potato with legs and eyeballs and a couple of sprouts sticking out of its head.

Next, people started drawing pictures of the Potatosaurus attacking cities and eating everybody. Not good, right? This guy needed someone to battle.

Enter Super Fridge. It turned out Super Fridge could throw food at people. He was friends with Butter Man, who was the only guy who could plug the Fridge in when he ran out of power. He also had his own little shelf in the Fridge.

Here's what the Potatosaurus-Fridge battle looked like. That's Butter in the middle. Those are Tater Tots attacking Fridge's head. That's food in Fridge's mouth.

Well it got weirder from there, and pretty soon we had to make a chart showing all the characters. It was the appliances vs. the foods, except Butter who sided with Fridge. There was Kiwi Man, and Banana Dude, and Pancake Batter Boy (who looked like Batman). And the Tater Tots all had their own names. Oh, and Cooler, who could throw juice boxes. And I think a microwave, and a lemon battling a bowl of soup.

At the end we copied all the drawings and put them into a short book, which we called "Kitchen Wars."

So as you can see, you can make the ultimate Battle for Earth happen using just about anything. You just need a hero, a villain, some sidekicks, superpowers and weaknesses, and some pencils and paper.

So go save the Earth! Or the galaxy, if you want something bigger.

Make a Popup Room!

This is a really cool project that came out of nowhere while we were messing with folding and cutting paper.
This is just a piece of thick paper, folded in half. Then we put two cuts in the middle there, and popped that piece out in the opposite direction.
Then, we took pens and decorated the folded part like a chair. The chair's back goes on the background, the seat goes on the top folded part and the legs go down the front of the folded part. Then we added a little rug, a bed and a window.
This one is a work in progress. You could certainly add more, like a popup table, or a cutout window. You could make a copy of your own room, or a room that you make up. Put posters on the walls. Add wallpaper or an electric guitar or stuffed animals or monsters.
But there's something about just the little chair that is also very neat to look at.

More on drawing to music...

As I mentioned in my last post, here are some drawings I made this morning while listening to some choral music - I'm not sure what piece it was - it was on the local classical station. I started out with the flowing shape at the top, then did the bubbly thing on the left, and then the sharper shape on the right. The cathedral-like structure came last. I'm not sure about the potted plant. I don't think that's related - just happens to be on the same page in the sketchbook.

When I listen to music, I often draw shapes that don't look like anything in particular. You might do the same, or maybe music inspires you to draw people or places. Give it a try and find out! It's also fun to contrast classical music with, say, Weezer or Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Beethoven

Okay, what does this guy have to do with art?

Well as it turns out, a lot.

Ludwig van Beethoven is considered by many to be the greatest music composer we've ever had. Even if you don't think you've heard his music, you probably have. And to top it off, for most of the later part of his life, he was deaf. Stone. Deaf. And he wrote his 9th Symphony, while stone deaf. When they premiered it, someone had to turn him around on the conductor's podium to see that the crowd was going wild. That's how deaf he was.

Anyway, what does this have to do with art? Well, the arts are connected to each other and to the world. Paintings and symphonies. Dance and writing. Beethoven often said that he got his inspiration from nature. He would take long walks outdoors.

So, here's a cool site by the SF Symphony that has a "radio," that lets you play bits from all kinds of pieces of music, including Beethoven's. Poke around. And while you're listening, close your eyes and imagine what the music looks like. Does it look like warriors riding huge horses? Or hippos doing the ballet? Or just colors and shapes? Then draw what you see.

Superheroes Rule.

The first part of summer has been mainly about superheroes. Pictured here are Pice Man, who shoots jelly out of his eyes, and who is apparently battling Captain Planet. The line through the middle is a zip line that Captain Planet uses to get around.

We've also had Doctor Spleen, and heroes based on a squirrel, a hedgehog, and a dragon. I generally help the kids come up with a "recipe" for a superhero -- things like a cool name, a logo, a costume, a sidekick, an arch enemy, and of course powers and weaknesses. Then I work on one along with them. They can do a trading card-like format where they draw their character and list important facts, or a movie poster, or maybe the cover of a comic book.

I had the kids help me create Ultra Kitty, who can shoot hairballs and whose weakness is anything shiny. Her enemy is Dogzilla, a chihuahua with an attitude and a scaly tail. Dogzilla's sidekick is Gadget the Robo Bird.

Oh, and then there are secret identities. Dogzilla spends the days as a celebrity purse-dog. We also had a mild-mannered toaster, and a hippo who lives at the zoo when not fighting crime.

Each kid will focus in on what is most interesting to him or her. Some are really into listing lots of important data. Others are into the relationships among a vast array of characters. Still others just want to show stuff blowing up. It's all good. Again, it's creating a safe place to generate lots and lots of idea and mess with them. And, the sound effects they make while demonstrating their characters' powers are pretty fun, too.

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.

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!

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!

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.

Keith Haring Coloring Book

Here's something fun to do online. It's a coloring book based on the work of Keith Haring. One note - you do have to double-click to select/deselect things. But once you get the hang of it, it's big fun.

Keith Haring got famous doing graffiti in the subways of New York. May 4th of this year would have been his 50th birthday, had he not died at age 31 from AIDS. Here's a bio.

And, there's more! The Haring Kids site is good for the younger set, which is good, since some of his subject matter can be kind of adult in nature. But this site is cool. Enjoy!

Flickr is Your Friend!

Continuing on the idea of Discovering Answers, I know I just said that things with screens are passive. Which they are.

That said, the Internet is a wonderful source of inspiration. You can find out a lot about what kinds of art you really like, then you can take an artist and look him or her up on Wikipedia or Google and learn even more.

(Note to Parents: Some art sites have, er, "interesting" content on them. Depends on your own sensibilities. But I'd recommend keeping an eye on what kids are searching or what links they are following. Or, search with them. The searches I recommend below came up with content that looked okay.)

And, a wonderful place to see tons of inspiring stuff is Flickr. There is much more on Flickr than just photos. Many, many artists put their stuff on there. (I do, too!)

Try typing these things into the search box at the top of the home page (the one that says "Search Everyone's Photos"):

"drawing"

"oil painting"

"etch a sketch"

"sharpie"

"illustration"

I also recommend this group pool on Flickr - called Moleskinerie. Moleskines are little notebooks that many creative people carry around with them everywhere. There is a lot of really cool stuff drawn in these books. I have piles of these things. Mine are nowhere near as attractive as some of the things you will see here.

So much great stuff to look at!

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.