Pocket Picassos

5 Week Classes

Stencil
The art of simple stencil, stippling brushes, spray paint; building towards a more complex layered stencil fro more depth. Nuanced graffiti! We love this class.

Drawing
Still life, chiascuro, pen and ink. Handmade paper for some of the drawings, graded pencils and feather pens. Back to basics to sharpen up our skills in technique, looking, and describing form.

Alien Space junk
Junk modelling on a home made moonscape. What can we dream up?

Cards: Greetings and Farewell
Painted cards, simple pop ups, rudimentary printed cards, and collage cards, for all occasions!

Stick Art
Draw a picture with the burnt end of a stick, make a stick house, a stick family and even do some basic whittling in our new forest school type class. 2 adults will always supervise around our garden wood burner.

Clay Faces and Pots
Need I say more? Also, attempting a face on a pot. Fun, messy, creative.

Soviet Socialist Realism
This recognisable tradition grew out of the glorification of the USSR in a kind of worldwide promotion. If ever anything beautiful came out of a dodgy ideology, this is it. Trust the artists to reap the cultural wheat. We are going to drape ourselves in flowing robes, garland our hair, and hold up the hammer and sickle, and pose as in one of our chosen paintings. The idea is to make paintings from the photographs we take of these compositions. Dramatic and painterly. A stylistic dream.

Dreaming of Dots
Using, with permission, stories and paintings of the Kukatja people of North Western Australia, we look at the ancient tradition of dot painting and meaning within those images. We will use this knowledge to create a Dreaming map of our own stories.

D Street Scenes
Use a range of materials as well as some model railway paraphenalia to create a model street scene of your own. Trafalgar Square, Petrograd Central, or maybe a fantasy street populated by unicorns! A masterclass in making, joining, invention and mess.

Leaf Crowns and other leaf art
Make willow and clematis crowns, roll clay onto a leaf to discover the brilliant pattern of the veins, make another crown with leaves and flowers, fashioned from cardboard, collage, wire and pliars. Busy and experimental, a fitting Springtime class.

Printmaking.
The rise of mass produced print to the gallery and then to high art status is one of the most significant of our age. We look at the Dada movement, Warhol and, Hockney. Students learn to use an etching press to produce their own "Images of mass production": etchings, lino and poly cuts, drypoint etching and collograph. Not to mention good old manual monoprint, hand, thumb and potato. A lot of technique. How exciting.

Animal Masks
Choose an animal and produce a cardboard base which is sculpted with modroc and painted. Loads of fun, experimental and messy. We will look at examples from the most basic animal head to complex and textured sculptures. Students be ambitious!

Found Object Sculpture
Marcel Duchamp and Antoni Tapiez, as well as many found object assemblages inform and inspire our sculpture pieces. We will allow animals, robots and wonderful assemblages to emerge through making, and invent new stories and ways of looking.

Room in a Box
Design your very own mini room with (for instance) plush carpet, rugs, jewelled cupboards, a Queen Anne chair, golden wallpaper and a 4 poster bed. Using a small box, modroc, glue, collage materials, chicken wire, feathers and glitter, make your dream room come to life. See how they compare with contemporary interior designs, Victorian doll houses, and William Moriss's ideas!

Cubism
Nobody does art like the Cubists. Picasso and Braque are responsible for taking tradition and turning it on its head, quite literally! We look at and practice 2 very distinct ways of constructing a cubist piece. We have a good go at mixed media and collage, and attempt an ambitious sculpture reflecting the Cubist style. Expect to be shattered.

Cast and gild your own hand
We look at the great gilt architraves, frames and sculpture of the renaissance period and the decoration that surrounds the great works of Michaelangelo, Raphael and Bernini. Children cast, prepare and gild their own stonecast plaster hand and mount it on a plinth. This is supported by sketches and drawings, Leonardo style, of hands, arms and the seated figure. Who knows, we may have the next "Thinker" in our midst!

Fantasy animals
For this project we become inspired by Patricia Piccinini's strange hybrids, the recognisable form of Wallace and Grommit characters, and take a look at some artists who make animals from found objects. The class makes drawings and collage pieces the wildest fantasy animals they can conjure up. Using their own liberated objects, chicken wire and modrock,they create their very own fantastical beast and finish it with paint, varnish and maybe a bit of bling.

Body Maps
We look at Howard Arkley's patterned work, and study several animal skin stripes and spots. The children decorate cardboard cutouts of themselves in a manner of their own choice; perhaps a reflective mood map of swirly patterns and long tendrils to represent dreams, perhaps an outrageous celebration of tiger stripes, leopardskin and peacock feathers. Drawing, writing and collage accompany.

Anime Graffiti and Manga
Banksy and Jean-Michael Basquiat: the fathers of graffiti, who ensured this exciting medium its place in the realms of High Art. Manga and anime are cousins of graffiti and fit naturally into individual designs which include our favourite plushys or characters! Let's put ourselves on the cutting edge of new art with these inventive pieces.