Ensure that the children have an understanding of the following artistic vocabulary and key terms:

After viewing

The artist has compiled the following activity for children: The emphasis is on ‘making art out of the things you like’. Each child should bring a range of items from home that they think says something about who they are individually and what they like doing. These could be:

Days 1 and 2:

Line
Each child explores, using coloured pens, the linear qualities of items brought, isolating shapes, outlines, edges and places where two things overlap. Concentrating on one area of a photograph or part of an object, try to enlarge the scale and make a repeat pattern using the same shapes.

Tone

Charcoal will be used to recreate the texture of the surface of the item. Look at the item or photograph, and pick out the darkest areas and the lightest areas. Cover a piece of paper in charcoal in a medium darkness. Now rub out the areas that you want to be of light tone, and add more charcoal onto the areas which are to be of the darkest tone. This gives an illusion of volume and space.

Collage

Look at examples of Cubism. Cut out some shapes, cut up some of the earlier tonal drawings and collage them together to make a new image. Think about the composition and pattern on the flat surface (consider Matisse at this point). Combine the tones and lines, then, using old magazines, find colours that match the tones in your collage. Cut out the colours and shapes and make another collage in this way.

Days 2, 3 and 4:

Beginning to paint
When starting to paint, stick with black and white. Painting either the original objects, mixing together the black and white to cover as many shades of grey as possible. Use a range of brushes and implements – such as sponges clothes, and fingers – to try out different ways of making marks. Practice colour mixing, look at basic principals, primaries, light and dark tones, families of colours, opposing colours, and optical effects.

These exercises will prepare each child to work on a large-scale painting. They will have to think about what kind of atmosphere they want in the painting. Will it be daytime, nighttime, calm, angry, or a combination of these things? They will have to choose a range of colours to work with. Starting with a coloured ground, drawing out shapes, painting in tones, adding texture, overlaying forms and building up a surface, are key points. The paintings will be constructed from the graphic shapes and forms as well as painted textures and mixed media, for example, paper, magazines, oil bars.

Collage
Choose three sheets of different coloured paper and cut out three different shapes from the drawings, using the entire sheet. Glue these large shapes onto an A1 sheet so that the edges overlap to make new shapes. Draw over the top of the base shapes in coloured pen or pastel, using repeated line drawing of the same shapes again. Make sure to overlap even more in order to create an interweaving design of negative and positive forms – use Matisse cut-outs as a reference. The spaces on the paper can now be filled in a variety of ways – by ripping up bits of paper, magazines, newspaper, or plastic to make a textured surface, or through tonal experiments with pastels – grading from light to dark like Rothko, dotting on pure colour like Seurat, or colouring in with felt-tip pens.

Painting
Using the collage as a starting point, take a board or piece of card and a large. Create a coloured background by choosing two colours from the same family (eg yellow and orange or blue and green) and carefully blend together making a rainbow effect. Let dry.

Draw out your shapes again using a thinner brush. As with the collage, these forms should overlap and fill the whole page, creating new shapes and areas. You can colour in some of these shapes using either a contrasting or a complimentary colour.

The next stage is to look at different techniques of handling paint. Look at the work of artists Auerbach, Hodgkins and Seurat. Try applying different textures into the new areas you have designed, eg apply lots of tiny dots of pure colour in the manner of pointillism, or apply very thin lines of paint, to get as much variety across the page as possible. Experiment with the paint in a controlled manner.

Using acrylic
Create a background by doing one of the following:

Fill the areas between shapes with different types of marks, using a variety of shading techniques such as hatching, dots, impasto (applying paint thickly so that brush marks are evident), or overlaying colour.

Materials needed:

Vikki paints with oils mixed with turpentine. These products are not suitable for children in a workshop situation. The artist used acrylic paint and is happy that the children will achieve similar results.