Painting and drawing I—from traditional to modern

We started art camp off this summer with a trip back in time to visit ancient art, medieval arts and then moved onto the renaissance period and finally to more modern art in America. We started by looking at Egyptian and Greek pots then painting a story on a clay pot in only 1-2 colors. It is a bit of a challenge to limit the palette that much but they made it! 

We moved on to the medieval period and discussed lettering in bibles and important documents and how they were decorated by the scribes with scenes or items relevant to the person. We used wood blocks given to me by the HOTT tole painters group that we had primed in gold for the campers.

Our last project was a fabric painting of an ancient Indian elephant with a lot of gold trim. Because I wanted them to concentrate on drawing the details on the elephant and painting it, the pattern was on their fabric. 


2nd day we moved on to looking at and discussing impressionists, well known artists and pointillism. We started with a tape resist and did a finger painted Monet bridge in his garden. Some of them were not very comfortable with the finger painting only tapping but in the end most did pretty well. the magic was when we pulled the tape off. the oooh and aaahs!  
I pulled out a variety of cloth bags for them to chose from and we talked about Van Gough and his sunflowers. Everyone then got to draw and paint their bags. 

 Kat got to teach the last project today on pointillism using examples from Seurat. I had a variety of wood pieces and we had several different size items for them to dot with.

Our final day started with a Georgia O'Keefe type watercolor. We looked at a number of her paintings both of flowers and of other scenery. We drew the set of morning glories then did wet painting of them. Finally all the kids got how to add paint into the water on the paper and help it move instead of just painting  with the watery paints. Lots of oooh and aaahs on this too. We did a bit of salting at the end too. 

Kat got to lead the Chagall circus scene with the camp and probably got the kids to draw more intricate figures than ever. Yes there were monkeys hanging by their tails too.  The scenes were very detailed. We did colored pencils to complete this one.

Lastly we used an unknown artist as an example and did a very different technique with them. It is a tree with lights in it on a moonlight background. We used the four colors without cleaning our foam brush--scary to not wash your brush!! We then drew the tree in with lots of branches and did dot on dot for our lights. It was really quick and they did a fantastic job. Always goes too fast.

many more pictures at Painting and drawing I