Colouring Outside Your Mind Spring 2012 Day 3

COLLABORATION and IMAGINATION

In the third class of the Colouring Outside Your Mind workshop for adults, we began by loosening up with a fun exercise called "Exquisite Corpse."  It is a term coined by surrealist artists in the 1920’s and 1930’s to describe the process of several artists (or writers, musicians, playwrights, etc) working together on a single piece without knowing what each one was making.  The basic concept behind this technique is for one artist to begin a drawing and then to conceal what he or she is making from the other artists in the group.  The next person in succession continues the drawing using only minimal clues left behind by the first person’s drawing...

After a short strawberries and cookies break (!), the students were put to work "drawing their day"...what would your day look like if you drew it as a continuous line, without lifting your pen from the page?   These drawings were then painted with water soluble crayons.

The next exercise involved working with a partner to generate "shadow drawings," which were used later in the class as the basis for an abstract painting.

These last images show the students painting their shadow drawings, and having fun with colour and texture!

Check back in two weeks for the final installment in the Colouring Outside Your Mind workshop...