Children’s Art Classes

Children 5 to 10 years

CLASS TIMES:
Tuesday 4pm – 6pm
Wednesday 4pm – 6pm
Thursday 4pm – 6pm
Saturday 4pm – 6pm

Children feel good while they are creating, art helps boost self-confidence. And children who feel able to experiment and to make mistakes feel free to invent new ways of thinking, which extends well beyond the craft room.  There is no such thing as a bad drawing or painting.  Children learn how to paint with their hands, how to paint with wet and dry wipes, most importantly they learn how to make mistakes and how they can be corrected and made into beautiful art pieces.

The first lesson is how to create form using a unit of measure, after that it is all tone, dark medium and light tones.  Teaching them how to look at form and then create it on paper or canvas using chalk pastels, and paint.

Pencils and erasers are rarely used in the art rooms with the exception of the older teenagers. The reason is purely practical: small pencil leads to encourage small drawings. If a student is drawing a portrait and then is required to paint that very portrait, using a pencil will surely lead to frustration. It’s hard to paint tiny eyes!

There is another reason: pencil markings can be erased, which leads to second guessing, which leads to lots of eraser action, which leads to class being over before the student has anything on his/her paper. Using chalk pastels and charcoal allows the student to move quickly, commit to the drawing and forgive their “mistakes”. This is a big part of art, giving into the process and not worrying about the details.

Objectives of Learning how to Paint.

How to create a landscape on drawing paper and canvas board, using paint.

Recognizing where the foreground, middle ground, background, disappearing point, perspective and the horizon line must be drawn.

Learning different techniques on how to apply paint, using fingers and brushes, palette knives, wet and dry techniques and how to apply paint using materials.

Learning how by applying paint at the right angle illusions of vertical and horizontal layering can be achieved

How to draw animals is a very important aspect of the art curriculum, as it teaches the children how to see the difference in the make up of the physical appearance of the animal, whether the animal has short or long legs, long or short neck, where the eyes, nose and ears are positioned.  

How to draw them in the varying states of running, standing, sitting, how to position them into a landscape.

Drawing is very important for children as it teaches them the fundamentals of art. How drawings are composed using tone, perspective, vanishing points etc. Many children do not know that artists have learned to draw by doing observation-drawing practice. They often assume that you can draw or you can’t. Of course this is true, but it is also true that you can learn how to draw at any age. Drawing ability comes from practice, practice and more practice, which leads to focus, familiarity and confidence. Visual information is useless unless you notice it.

How to draw animals is a very important aspect of the art curriculum, as it teaches the children how to see the difference in the make up of the physical appearance of the animal, whether the animal has short or long legs, long or short neck, where the eyes, nose and ears are positioned. How to draw them in the varying states of running, standing, sitting, how to position them into a landscape.

Often when learning to draw, you need to temporarily hold off judgment and try not to second guess what you think the object should look like, rather than what the object actually looks like.

The idea is to create a zone of absorption, a state where time travels quickly and you are in what psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls ‘flow’. Now it does take practice in order to reach this stage in creativity, but it is very attainable and the teenage students are creating incredible work with great flow.

How Does It Feel to Be in Flow?
1. Completely involved in what we are doing – focused, concentrated.
2. A sense of ecstasy – of being outside everyday reality.
3. Great inner clarity – knowing what needs to be done, and how well we are doing.
4. Knowing that the activity is doable – that skills are adequate to the task.
5. A sense of serenity – no worries about oneself, and a feeling of growing beyond the boundaries of the ego.
6. Timelessness – thoroughly focused on the present.
7. Intrinsic motivation – whatever produces flow becomes its own reward.

Flow is the mental state when you are fully immersed in an activity, a feeling of full involvement and energy. Now this is fairly hard to achieve, but I know that when I reach this stage the creativity just flows through my fingers.

Objectives of Learning Craft.

• Clay, how to model a free standing 3d piece of clay, representing animals, birds or human. High and low relief modeling is also included.
• Wire, how to create forms using outlines with internal supports.
• Paper Mache, how to create an internal support structure and then model the paper on top to create a recognizable object.
• Crayon Art, how to use stencils and heat crayons to create form.
• Kite making, how to create a structural support system and create an aeronautical surface.

Craft activities develop thinking, relating, and coordinating skills.

Participating in arts and crafts activates both the linear, left hemisphere and the creative, non-sequential right hemisphere of the brain. Generally, here is how the two sides of our brain process information:

Left Hemisphere: Logical, Sequential
Activated by reading, math, or linear problem solving

Right Hemisphere: Creative, Intuitive
Activated by art, music, drama

The potential for creativity “the act of making something new” lives in each of us. Most of us act less and less upon this potential with each passing year. Our own creativity becomes a memory, something we outgrow or lose along the way. If children grow up believing they are creative, they will have a better chance of finding constructive outlets for creative energy in later years. A child’s creativity will not be just a memory; it will be a valuable, personal resource to use every day.

Each Summer there are Animation Camps specifically to teach students how to draw digitally, using the skills they have learnt in the drawing class and transferring these techniques using Photoshop and Procreate on drawing pads. These classes are aimed specifically from young teenagers up. Luckily we live in the digital age, an age of opportunity and discovery. We live today in A Digital World, so it is very important to move with the times and teach students how to use creative design programs so they can utilize their drawing skills on different platforms, using digital tools to create and make without constraints.

Why study animation with Students? Because it’s a great vehicle to help them better understand storytelling and sequencing ideas, whether in words or pictures. Simple animation techniques are fun, hands-on projects that incorporate play, creativity and collaboration. Because the underlying processes are the same as for video, animation projects are a powerful way to help kids understand and prepare for more sophisticated media projects.

The fact is that animation, whether a flip-book or full-length Disney movie, is simply telling a story by finding the right sequence of pictures and words. That is a powerful skill for kids to master. Before any animator, filmmaker or video artist begins a project, he or she first does a storyboard to lay out the sequence of actions.
Hand-drawn animation activities are an excellent step to help children become better storytellers and prepare them for a storyboarding project, followed by computer animation, multimedia presentations or video. Start by leading a discussion that helps students explore aspects of a story they may not have noticed immediately, such as how it develops, what’s missing, the use of language, how words and pictures work together, and what the story means to them.

The students work on Mac’s using Photoshop, Illustrator, Procreate, Director and  iMovie