Evening Workshops for Parents and Teachers

Workshops are designed to give parents and teachers a night out to explore their own creativity and to inspire ideas for using materials at home, in the classroom or in a community setting. Here, participants enjoy time in the studio creating hand-made paper.

Evening workshops can also make a nice parent/child outing for older children. We welcome mixed age and multigenerational groups.

We will teach you the basics and the rest is up to you. We enjoy seeing what participants invent; here round pieces of paper are pressed out of the mold on top of each other to create a larger multi-color piece.

Working in a casual group setting inspires collaboration and learning from each other. This piece builds with a variety of sizes and shapes as well as different colors.

Workshops offer a variety of ways to extend and explore with materials. In this picture colorful collage materials were sprinkled in the pulp as it was lifted out of the water.

The nice thing about open-ended materials is they can be used in many different ways. Another artist pressed collage pieces into the wet sheet of pulp, sort of like creating a mosaic on the paper.

It is fun to see where the process leads. In this group, what began as single sheets of handmade paper grew into explorations of shape, color, texture, and composition. This piece was created with several sizes, shapes, and colors of handmade paper along with collaged papers and natural objects.

Inventing Designs with Rollers and Paint

S began by dabbing spots of paint onto her roller with the brush. She noticed the patterns of dots created when she rolled across her paper.

She adds additional dabs of paint along the roller, planning a pattern of different colored dots around different sections of the roller.

Here she discovers that if she dips the end of the roller in the jar, she can create stripes. This is added on top of her original pattern.

One of the fun things about working in a studio is learning from each other. Here, Teresa helps B try the dabbing technique on his painting.

Lines and Hands

K explores pencil drawing by tracing back and forth between her fingers. Here, she lifts her hand, delighted by the resulting lines.

She tries mom's hand too. It is bigger and she is able to go all the way around the fingers.

Mom's hand and K's hand and the lines drawn around them.

Constructing with Clay and Sticks

Working with clay shapes, M discovers she can string them on a stick to connect them together.

The sticks form an armature for her sculpture, holding the clay shapes on top of a sturdy base. She tells mom it is a van.

She adds more sticks, building additional parts with sticks stuck in the clay sculpture.

The van is complete and ready to drive! Placment on a plastic tray makes it easier to slide it around the table and floor.