Tangled in Mixed Media

Popular children's media and stories often make their way into the studio. One of my favorite things is the re-telling of these stories by children using art media. This young woman began by creating the princess from "Tangled" with clay coils.

More coils add length to her hair.

Until it is SOOO long it extends off the table on one side.

Moving to paint she continued her portrait theme.

This time creating a painted portrait of the princess with long hair extending down the paper.

I wonder at the complexity of the story telling and observation in moving from one media to another. So often when drawing (or in this case painting) follows building the two dimensional image seems to gain depth and detail from having first been modeled in three dimensions. In this case the clay coils were used almost as the lines of a drawing that can be seen here to also be a sort of draft image for this painting.

a@tc Internship: 10.19 Wednesday Drawing Studio

a@tc Internship: 10.19 Wednesday Drawing Studio: At the beginning of each class, young artists are asked to practice drawing their hand. In keeping with tradition, we began class by drawin...

Sometimes you have to do a little drawing

In our evening drawing studio, we spent the third week exploring shape and shadows. The flash of the camera cuts out the shadows of the blocks below but you can get an idea from the drawing that it was a complex composition of shapes and shadows.

Another student used blocks, observing the multiple shadows created by several points of light from our overhead track lighting.

Finally the artists discovered that isolating a single object and single light source made it that much easier to carefully observe the light and shadow on different surface planes. In this case the size of the drawing paper seemed to help too. The artist felt much more satisfied with these little drawings done of a single object which allowed for focus and simplification. They make a lovely series as well.