Colouring Outside Your Mind - Winter Session

The third Colouring Outside Your Mind classes was held last week, and the students had lots of fun warming up with the classic parlour game, Exquisite Corpse.   Exquisite Corpse 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.  The drawing is finished after each person in the group has made a contribution to the final product.

The next exercise involved "Drawing your Day"...using black sharpies, the students put their pens down on the paper, and drew a continuous line across the page, doodling the highlights of their day with quick gestural lines.   The resulting shapes were coloured in with Aquarelle crayons, and then water added to give them a watercolour quality.  This exercise was quite popular, as it gets you thinking about your day and all that it typically holds.

Fun with Shadow-drawing!  For the next exercise, the students worked in groups of 3, each taking a turn at casting shadows, and then directing the others so they could draw overlapping shadow outlines onto large pieces of paper.  

Once they had the right number and arrangement of shapes on their page, the students began painting in the shapes with acrylic paint and gel medium.  This group really knows how to get down to business, and they all completed painting their piece (quite a lot of painting, really) in the balance of the class.

 

 

 Once they had filled in all their shapes, the students had the option of using black grease pencils (China markers) to follow some or all of the shape outlines to enhance the piece, and highlight the shapes...the results are spectacular!!