Donaghey P.S. | Artist Journal

Great excitement greeted me in the room this morning. Between last week and this week the children had invited family members to come along and pose for portraits. The whole room was cleared out and the couple of tables left inside were laden with lovely papers and drawing materials. We had guests of all ages including grannys, grandas, mummies, siblings from the school and an aunt who brought her 10-week old baby with her.

It was a little bit pressurised to start with -I think that the children felt a bit nervous about drawing people from outside the class but as the morning progressed they relaxed into it. There was more pressure if a particular child had invited someone into the session as they felt that they wanted to make a really strong piece of artwork about that person. The children decided if they wanted to do longer or shorter poses and helped to reassure their sitters and advise them on how to behave. At times there were 6 people posing simultaneously in different parts of the room. I encouraged the class to use the full range of available materials and we revisited some of the techniques and inspirations that we had been looking at over the weeks: scribbly lines, shading, close-ups, profile portraits. Mrs Wilson and Tanya were so attentive to visitors and children alike. They carefully filed away images between sheets of paper to keep them safe and distributed tea and coffee and biscuits to the guests and documented the whole morning.

For our final week the children would like to use the materials we have been working with plus pen and wash, paint and drawing with bread. Some of them are very keen to do self portraits and some might return to subjects that they have already done. There is time for them to take photos to work from if their subject isn’t available.

Leandra: “The more we did the more confident we got.”

Rachel: ” I wasn’t that sure before about drawing real life people but now I think that I can.”

Euan: “I didn’t think that anything was a challenge this week. It made you feel like a proper artist.”

In following on from last week’s session, it seemed like a good idea to continue experimenting with different drawing styles. From the collected portraits the image of a boy by Colin Davidson was around the same age as people in the class and his work had inspired the class. We looked at it again, discussed the age of the subject, the fact that it was black and white. I had taken a photo of myself in a similar pose and encouraged the children to work in pairs to pose each other as closely as they could for a photograph. The class used chalk and charcoal on tea-coloured wax paper to play with smudging and blending. The work was really different from other portraits that the class had done. While they were working Mrs Wilson printed out their photo portraits. These became the basis for self-portraits in the style of Colin Davidson. I only saw them through the computer when everyone held them up but they looked incredible.

After break we moved on to a wholly different approach and made drawings after a Rembrandt self-portrait. The children had responded very positively to this work and it was remarkable how they adapted to this very different style. Again, they had the challenge of applying this style to their own original subject. The children picked some work to show me and it was really strong. Individual styles were coming through and the marks were energetic and free.

Feedback from the children noted that the Colin Davidson style was harder than last week but they thought that they had started to differentiate between line drawings and shaded or smudged drawings.  Also they had discovered that shading was different from colouring-in. That’s quite a big thing to get the head around.  Some of them are really getting to enjoy working with charcoal and they liked combining it with chalk. They thought that the pen drawings were messy and fun and really easy to draw, describing Rembrandt as ‘crazy’ and looking ‘like a lion’. They liked making all of the scribbly lines.

After the previous week I had contacted Eddie Rafferty to let him know that the children had made drawings after his work. He thought that it was fantastic that they could draw with such ease and confidence. I don’t think that they realise just how good they are.

 

Over the course of my research for this phase I have collected a set of portraits representing different styles and using different media. We have looked at some of them in previous sessions but today the children’s first task was to find all of the images that showed a profile. This was the cause of controversy as different children recognised different images as profile portraits and so we discussed the key things that designated a profile image. There were a few tricky ones -e.g. one image contained both full face and profile. There was a lot of thought about the media and about what images appealed to the children as well. This has opened up lots of other ideas about how we can be inspired for future work. We even tried creating one of the Carravaggio poses. Quite a dramatic posture.

 

The morning continued with some profile drawing in chalk on black card. Whether it was the unfamiliar background colour or the medium itself that the children enjoyed, I’m not sure but the work that they produced was full of detail and spontaneous shading broke out unexpectedly. It seemed as if the class had been inspired by the work that they had been looking at and ideas and possibilities had been absorbed.

Continuing with the inspiration, the next adventure was to make a pencil drawing inspired by Eddie Rafferty’s print. The results were really strong and individual pieces of artwork. Lots of detail and delicate mark-making were visible and the children were confident enough to shade and smudge with the pencil. We were all very excited by the results and looked at everyone’s work.

We pushed on even further by experimenting with composition. Inspired by the Eye of Lotte image, the children took turns to draw each other with a similar cropped composition. Not an easy ask, admittedly. There was less confidence in shading and the children seemed to be a bit more inhibited than in the previous exercise but some of the results were still fantastic. It’s great to push beyond conventional framing and look at other ways of composing images. Some of the children thought that they might like to try drawing people with different facial expressions. So many possibilities are opening up for our precious remaining weeks.

There has been a long gap between the previous session and today so I wasn’t sure how long it would take to get back into the swing of things. Not long, as it turned out. The children were keen to show me some of their homework from over Easter. They were sent home with some different kinds of paper and asked to do some life drawings with charcoal and pencil during the course of the holidays. I didn’t get to see everyone’s work but throughout the morning we paused to look and learn from it. There was plenty to admire. I could see that most people were making good use of the space on the page and that there was more detail coming through. We tired to guess ages and relationships of the sitters to the artist. A lot of the children said that they preferred pencil drawing to charcoal as it didn’t break so easily and was less messy. They did observe that for hair and shading charcoal was easier. There were some strong resemblances coming through the work and it was definitely easier to tell the age of the subject. The children said that they had to bribe much younger siblings to sit still with biscuits and chocolate. Joseph had drawn a profile portrait of  his Dad using a torch to cast a shadow on the wall -reminiscent of our work long ago in the Drawing with Light phase. Courtney had drawn a profile on one side of the page and a full face portrait on the other and when she held it up to the light there was an intriguing, if unintentional, overlap -might revisit that idea at a later stage. Some of the parents have been really supportive of this work at home, encouraging the children to look for details like shape of face, freckles, stubble and even wrinkles.

I have been encouraging the children to use shading but they often revert to line drawings. Since they do this so beautifully, Mrs Wilson and I have decided to cultivate the line drawings further and not worry too much about light and shade at the moment.

We wouldn’t normally look down our noses but we made an exception today. Some of the class have very interesting cartoon-like styles when it comes to drawing noses and so we experimented with different ways of tackling them by feeling the shape of our own profiles and drawing that. Most of the class reckoned that they had been underestimating the distance that the nose stuck out from the rest of the face when doing profiles. Face on is harder to master -we tried tipping the head back so that the nostrils became more noticeable. There was some mirth at this. We also looked at ears in detail.

After all of the experimentation, it seemed right to apply the fresh observations to a larger scale piece of work so the children used the drawing boards that I had improvised for them from thick corrugated cardboard and packing card. This helped them to work on bigger scale paper and allowed them to keep looking at the person they were drawing. In this case the children made a few light sketches and then “drew” boldly with paint on tea-coloured wax paper using two different sized brushes. The very silence in the room when they were working spoke volumes about the concentrated quality of the work. To free everything up even more the final few minutes of the session were spent using the brush and paint to do some “not looking” work where the children were encouraged to keep their attention on the person they were painting and not to look at the page at all. They still keep cheating at this. We will keep trying as the results are always fantastic, especially when they genuinely don’t look at the marks they are making until they finish.

Mrs Wilson and Tanya remarked that the drawing boards had made a big impact on the day’s work, giving the children added confidence and even changing their posture when they were working. There are so many potential directions with the work now -the class are freeing up. I’m not sure if there will be time for another homework before the next session.

 

How did we get to this? It all started off innocently enough today but plans were afoot to push into new drawing territory and it was about to get a little messy…

We began to experiment with drawing pencils, seeing which was darker, a HB, 2B, 4B or 6B. I had sent some new pencils in the post since the previous online session.

We looked at drawings by artists like Colin Davidson and Rembrandt to see how they drew shadows and tried to find dark and light areas within these images. The children were predominantly drawing with line at this stage, although some had started to add shading.

The class came up with  reasons why we might use bread:

To dab the pencil with

To draw on

For eating

Instead we covered sheets of paper with charcoal, shaped the slice of bread and used it to erase the charcoal and show the light areas were in our portraits. We did short studies with different sizes of paper and worked on freeing up arm movements to fill areas more quickly. One of the other teachers in the school came in at the end of the session and her face was a picture of horror when she saw the charcoal and crumbs. Mrs Wilson had a large smile on her face -perhaps it was a grimace. It will all wash off….eventually….

 

A parcel arrived from Donaghey PS. Always a treat. Inside were the childrens’ drawings from their homework. Mrs Wilson is in America but she posted it before she left. I opened it with excitement. There was beautiful work inside. Each child had drawn a “not-looking” drawing and a “looking” drawing. I scanned in each image -some of them needed a little bit of flattening.

Once scanned, I considered each image and made a note on a post-it for the children of what I noticed within it. Then I posted them all back to Donaghey and made some adjustments to the plans for the next session.

Today was our first session back after Christmas. It seems like it has been a long break. Mrs Wilson and I had planned carefully in the meantime, looking at what was working and what areas needed more focus. For this session we decided to ask the children to draw each other. The session started with that invitation: choose a partner and draw each other. The children had some questions about media and length of time. We decided that they could choose within a selection that Mrs Wilson provided and that the pose would last 10 minutes. All of the children drew their partner at the same time as their partner was drawing them. We didn’t intervene.

When the time was up we looked at the drawings and reflected. What would the class do differently if they were drawing their partner again? They thought that they should take turns to draw each other. We continued to experiment throughout the morning, doing short poses where the children were asked not to look at the page and longer poses where they did. We tried drawing the backs of heads and profile drawings using pencil. Within the pairs the children also took photos of full face, profile and back of head.

It was interesting how many children looked at the page during the not-looking-at-the-page experiment. Some of them had trouble sitting still for the longer poses.

There was a lot of laughter when they looked at the results of the not-looking experiments. They thought that it was hard not looking at the page:

“You didn’t know where your pencil was going or how it would turn out.”

The children described these drawings as messy, scribbly, funny and weird but thought that they were more interesting than the more accurate representational drawings. Mrs Wilson thought that they were funky and they reminded me of Picasso. That can’t be a bad thing.

 

The profile was a real challenge but they did very well with it -very impressed. I showed them a Man Ray photo of Lee Miller and we talked about the idea first. It’s quite hard for the younger children to get their heads around the idea of drawing a person but only putting one eye and one ear on the page.

 

What was really fascinating for me was that although we had to conduct the session with big technical obstacles -no sound for part of the time, getting shut out of the session repeatedly -we all still really enjoyed it. At the end of the session I asked the children what age group of people they had been drawing and they said children. How could they draw someone from a different age group? They suggested that they could draw their nanny or granda at home or their mum or dad or an older cousin who was a teenager or a baby brother or sister. That has become their homework and they will post the results to me between now and the next session. They have decided to do two drawings -both full face and of the same person: a 1 minute not-looking-at-the-page pose and a longer 10 minute version. I’m really looking forward to seeing what they come up with.

Today’s session started with an ambitious live journal review session. In this the children reflected on the previous week, what they had heard and seen, what they had done, what they had discovered, what images had stayed in their heads. They had some great answers and Mrs Wilson typed the answers directly into their journals. Words and phrases that I liked were “smudge”, “fish bone” and “nostrils of the blue cow”. While most of the class took their photos and typed their names on the board so that I have everyone’s photograph and don’t leave anybody out during sessions, a small group chose 3 images that represented the previous week’s work. These will also go on the journal.

The children were confident with the whiteboard and could make new pages and take photos fairly rapidly although they did get one of me by mistake. The older children were keeping an eye on the background of the photos to make sure that each photo showed only one person. The typing is a bit fiddly so a few people temporarily rechristened themselves as bg and emmm but it got sorted.

Half of the class then worked with watercolour paints, continuing the experiments with media from the previous week using Bethany’s objects and/or their own thumbs. The other half of the class observed the painters, sketching them with pencils, taking photos and making notes about what they were doing. We stopped and evaluated briefly. Then the two groups swapped round and repeated the activities. This is what the children said about that part of the session:

“Everybody was concentrating.” -Emily

“You could make different colours by mixing.” -Beth

“Bethany was concentrating very hard.” -Leandra

“When you are painting an object that is lighter on one side you can paint the light side first and let it dry and then paint the darker side.” -Sarah

“It’s hard to draw people when they are working.” -Patrick

“Do it slowly because if you do it fast it is more messy and not as tidy.” -Sam

I addressed the idea of messy and tidy. It’s important to get a balance between focussed work and free experimentation. Mrs Wilson and I have been discussing this idea over the past while and figuring out ways to free up the children’s work and stop them from worrying about being perfectionist while keeping the clarity and concentration going. During this dual activity the consensus was that the painting group were concentrating more than the drawing/ observing group. Perhaps at some stage we can figure out why that might be….

After break we changed to a new media for most of the children: charcoal. They decided that they would like to draw live things so some of them drew their own hands or thumbs or the person opposite them or the ear of  the person beside them. At the beginning the new medium distracted them a little bit. They had been experimenting with making different marks and testing out and some of them started to draw without looking so we refocussed on that idea of observation, looking for light and shade and detail within the object. I had explained to the children that I made one drawing the previous week in the amount of time that it took them to  make 4 or 5. I wondered why that might be:

“Because you were taking your time.” -Euan

“Maybe your drawing had more detail.” -Joseph

The children shared some of their work there and then -with paintings we haven’t been able to do that so much as they would run if held up vertically too soon. It was great to get some instant feedback through the photos. The work is really varied -I’m particularly pleased about that. It means that the children are trying things out, taking the initiative and making decisions about their subjects. Mrs Wilson and I had to make extra -detailed plans for this session as the previous week was quite disrupted by poor connections through the whiteboard. I was a bit concerned that it might be too rigid but the added layer of structure and planning did help in this case as there were some points where there was a bit of a delay and because we had made contingencies for those moments, the work was able to flow on without undue disruption.

We have to stop for Christmas now and I really don’t want to. We are just getting going.

 

 

 

This week we are continuing to puzzle about what is alive and how can we tell. We started by checking our pulses again -you can never be too careful, it seems. Most of the class seemed to be alive although a couple needed a second opinion. A lot of children had shown the journals to family members since last week, so they were really tuned in to the topic. Bethany had been inspired to bring in some exciting objects for the all of us to investigate. The children passed them round and tried to figure them out.

Some of these were very unusual objects indeed and there were oohs and ahhs as she revealed them one by one and they were passed carefully around. Maybe Bethany will reveal what they are on the class journal. Meanwhile I won’t spoil the mystery. We discussed why the rest of the class had chosen the objects that they collected in playground the previous week:

I thought it was a good texture. I was interested to see if I would be able to paint it -Sarah

I picked it because it was an unusual leaf and it had black spots on it. -Rachel

My leaf had lots of bumps on it. -William

I thought that the things on the end of it were nuts. It had a hundred little seeds on each pod. -Courtenay

Beth picked a leaf because she thought it was alive. Joseph picked a leaf. It was completely green. Emily got grass -she thought it was alive.

It was interesting that a lot of them were thinking as much about the aesthetic appeal of the object as about the idea of whether it was alive or not. I asked what they had done with the objects and they said that they had thrown them in the bin because they knew that they would die. I showed them one of the objects that I had picked up and brought into the house last week. Some of the class took these photos using the instant camera. I changed the background to make the object stand out more.

 

I told the children about another live thing that  I discovered last week when I was outside -the one that steamed up my camera lens.

I got them to think about whether or not she was alive. They came up with some interesting answers and deductions.

Some groups thought:

Yes, because it moos, eats, has a heart that pulses and movement and it can breathe. Because it’s walking and has a label in its ears -you take that out when you take it in to the factory or if it dies.

Another group thought:

Not necessarily. The picture was taken last week and she could have died in between.

In fact the second group was right. The cow had complications with her last calf and it died earlier this year and because she can’t have more calves, last week was her last week. Full stop. The farmer brought her to the “factory”. One of the children had a parent who works in a slaughter house and the children revealed a large amount of farming expertise in their responses to this story. It is obvious that we need to make more time to explore their considerable experience as part of our project because they were talking about life expectancy of beef and dairy cattle and knew about sheep as well. Tip of the iceberg, I think for this strand of work as it relates so closely to our exploration of life cycles.

I showed the children some tiny tiny snails that had got caught up in the fur of another animal this very day and brought into the house. They were totey and moving around in the vessel I had carefully placed them in. I couldn’t photograph them with the built in camera as they were so small. This led us to thinking about parts of our own bodies that were like the snail’s shell and grew with us as we grew. The children thought of bones, teeth and I suggested fingernails. We experimented with drawing the top part of our thumbs using different media -oil pastel, chalk on black paper, drawing pencils and biros. It took me the whole time to draw my thumb with a pencil!

The whole session was plagued by bad sound and long delays so it was amazing that we covered so much ground despite a trying connection that made video dodgy, all text useless and my voice squeaky. It’s been a long time since we have had so much interference from the technology. I hope it’s just a blip. We take it for granted when things go well. Today was a reminder that we can’t get complacent.