Kid's Art

This week I taught a couple of art classes at a small summer camp in East Palo Alto. The kids were young and the classes each day were only 40 minutes. Since the theme of the camp was Camp Safari, I showed them jungle art by Henri Rousseau. Rousseau was one of those naive artists who didn't really get his career going until he was well into his forties. He was never formally trained as an artist and had never been to a jungle, but looked at reference and talked to many people who had. He then drew and painted from his imagination.

So that is what we did for this art lesson that lasted over four days. We practiced drawing from reference on the first day - plants and insects. On day two, each artist created an environment for their bugs using only their imaginations. The technique was crayon resist. The kids drew their compositions and outlined them with black sharpie markers. They then colored their "environments" with crayons and today we painted the backgrounds with watercolor which included painting over the crayon which resisted the paint.

The students were fearless when it came to laying down the watercolor wash. And the backgrounds were beautiful! I wish I could be as bold and uninhibited when I paint!