Tone

After the success of the colour wheel project and to continue exploring colour as a theme, this session looked at creating an educational workshop to explore tone.

A simple exercise that is suitable for Key Stage 2 and older learners is to build a tonal wash: Pick a colour and squeeze into your paint tray, with a wide brush paint a strip across the top of your paper, add a little water and paint another strip that slightly overlaps the first one, keep adding a little water at a time and painting strips until the paper is filled and you have a graduated tonal range. The above image shows this tonal range which has been cut up and rearranged on a background. It demonstrates the contrast between the tones really well.

Play around with different colours and techniques.

I introduced a tone workshop to the children in my after-school art and craft club who are mostly Key Stage 1 by showing them pictures from Picasso's blue period and explained that we can make many different types of blue or any other colour by making it lighter or darker.

We tried a tactile approach with some home-made balls of black and white playdough ( the recipe for this is 2 posts down in Colour Theory) and asked the children to make as many different tones inbetween as they could. Although they were able, they did this without much enthusiasm and became bored quite quickly.

So with further explanantion, a finished sample and a pre-prepared blank exercise sheet we started painting. Some children showed a natural understanding and appreciation of tone and subtle differences whilst others did as they were instructed but didn't really understand what they were doing or why.

Tone is quite a sophisticated subject for children to understand and didn't excite this group anywhere near the way that bright colours do. Without research I couldn't say if their visual abilities havn't developed enough at this stage in their development but this could be the reason why. However it is still interesting to observe what engages particular age groups and what does not in art education.

It was also interesting to watch a particular 5 year old's progress when she was left to her own devices. She did a very good job for her age with her exercise sheet and following instruction without much additional help. She was then allowed to continue exploring tone with a colouring-in sheet, you can see below (middle picture) that working with 1 colour was way too limiting for her and when she had become bored of that the hands came out! A 2 hour session with one 15 minute break is a very long time for someone of her age to engage in one activity so I think she did a fantastic job and had a lot of fun too.

In summary, when teaching about tone, because it is a complex subject I would definitely advise thinking carefully about the age group that the session was being aimed at and how best to present the information. With young children I would now prefer to approach the subject as a whole class game activity e.g. ask everyone to paint or choose a colour sample and then holding that colour see if the class can arrange themselves in a lighter-or-darker order and see how they negotiate the task. You could also prompt them with open questions such as "Where's the middle?"

Back to Basics

One if the first things we learn about in colour theory is the colour wheel. So I prepared plenty of blank A3 size copies of colour wheels to test this activity on an after-school group of children aged 5-8 years.

Painting can be very messy, which is part of the fun for younger children but does mean it needs some careful managing in order to minimise accidents and disgruntled parents! I speak from experience or rather previous lack of on this one! Give parents notice if you can so that old clothes can be worn or brought to the session, cover all surfaces and provide aprons or oversized old t-shirts as extra protection.

Additonally structure the lesson quite tightly, at least to begin with, so that the children get the opportunity to learn how to mix paints properly instead of rapidly ending up with large amounts of brown! Brown is a great colour but not the object of this exercise.

Ice cube trays work brilliantly for this activity because they minimise waste and provide plenty of separate spaces to mix new colours in.

I introduced the activity to the group with an example of a finished colour wheel, reassured them not to worry as we would go through it all one step at a time and give them plenty of time to finish (the temptation to rush ahead with this is quite strong (!) and we had a range of ages and abilities) and asked open questions such as "Can anybody tell me how orange is made?" and "Why do you think we always mix colours from light to dark?" Open questions are a great way to get children engaged with learning as it gives them the opportunity to show you how much they know, be encouraged and praised for their input and it gives you a good indicator as to what level your group understands the subject, where their strengths are and what areas you can help to improve on and who may need the most support.

We began by painting in the primary colours into the sections and learned how to mix the secondary colours and filled these in also. This took quite alot of time and concentration for our young group who were very quiet throughout so I loosened up the lesson after this by giving them each some white (absolutely no black!) to play with and allowing them to mix their own colours to paint in the tertiary sections (the girls were practically bursting to make pink!). I asked them to invent names to describe their colours which they responded to with titles such as "mysterious green" and "I don't know". They responded really well to the structure of mixing and invented lots of new and beautiful colours between them. Having not done a colour wheel myself for a very long time I had forgotten how much fun playing with pure colour can be and heard one 5 year old say "Whoa, this is brilliant!" as he watched new colours unfold under his brush and was able to control this to a certain degree with his new skills.

To move on from this I had originally planned for the group to make the spinners pictured below as I thought it would be another fun way to see how secondary colours are made. However when I tried this activity myself beforehand, it didn't really work very well and not wanting disappointed kids on my hands abandoned this idea and was reminded how useful preparation can be instead!

So we tried 'blow' painting. We watered down the colours the children had made, splattered them onto paper and blew the splatters with straws to see what shapes and colours could be made when they mixed. This is fun to do after the concentration earlier, uses the colours they already have and begins the tray cleaning process! Some of the colours already had quite a bit of water added so didn't need any more, it's just to loosen the paint up so that it travels across the paper more easily. These can be left to dry and then shapes can be looked for and drawn over in pencil.

The next Material Knowledge session will be held on Monday 15th April 6-8pm in the Art & Craft Studio, Level 2, St Luke's Community Centre, 90 Central Street, London, EC1V 8AJ. We will continue with the colour theme by looking at tone and how to create a fun educational session to explore this.









 

Colour Theory

This session began with a critique of artist and educator Hayley Harrison's work 'The Pillow' 2012, www.hayleyharrison.co.uk and sketchbook blog www.morethanweseem.wordpress.com

An art critique is an evaluation of a work of art. This can be viewed as a matter of personal taste, however, while researching for this months blog I came across a set of guidelines (www.wikihow.com/Critique-Artwork) that I think is a useful beginning to refer to for a more in-depth analysis and exploration. It could certainly provide the basis of a very stimulating educational session for children and young people to engage with their own, their peers and other artists work in this way.

It's fascinating and often enlightening to see and hear how artists think and produce. It's such a deep and personal, yet integral, part of the process that it's easy to overlook when presented with a completed work of art.The artist has been engaged with a whole dialogue within themselves from the idea conception all the way through to deciding to make that idea a reality and wrestling with how to achieve that, then evaluating at what point the work is complete and whether they feel it has realised their original intention or this has evolved through reflecting and acting with the work in progress.

Hayley's response was "Crit was really useful last night - starting to put the words personal and dystopia together. Personal dystopias. It helped me develop my language around my practice so thanks. Looking forward to discussing other people's work or arty topics".

Material Knowledge is open and happy to host critiques in all future sessions so do feel free to volunteer yourself and your work, I may even give this a go myself.

The second half of the session was very much inspired by another artist educator Ella Ritchie. She brought along her amazing home made playdough in primary colours and white for us all to have a play with. This was fantastic and we all really enjoyed the tactile nature of mixing colours together to create a whole range of secondary, tertiary, cold, warm and neutral tones.

The recipe for the playdough is:

200g plain flour

100g salt

30ml water

Dessert spoon oil

2 tsp cream of tartar

Food colouring (be careful if using liquid colouring not to make your mixture too sloppy)

Mix all of the dry ingredients together, mix all of the wet ingredients together and combine. Cook in a pan while stirring constantly  until the consistency becomes sticky and difficult to stir. As soon as this happens, tip the mixture out and allow to cool. This is non-toxic, although doesn't taste very nice as it's very salty and can be kept in an airtight container for up to 6 months.



Ella shared her tips with us that if you are working with children who are hyperactive you can add a couple of drops of calming essential oil such as lavender to the mix. Also with really young children you can reinforce how colours are made up by adding gold glitter to the yellow playdough, red glitter to the red and blue glitter to the blue. When a new colour is mixed e.g. orange, you can see the glitter colours in the mixture that went to make it up, gold (yellow) and red.

With the human eye able to recognise 2.8 million different hues we will be continuing with the colour theme next month.

The next Material Knowledge session will be on Monday 4th March 6-8pm in the Art Studio, Level 2, St Luke's Community Centre, 90 Central Street, London, EC1V 8AJ.



Crafty Christmas

Happy New Year Everyone!

On reflection, the last session and following festivities brought handmade into the lime-light for us arty (and skint!) types. Christmas, and indeed the rest of the year, needn't be about excessive consumption but an opportunity to think about alternatives and share them with others.

One idea we looked at was homemade decorations using recycled magazine covers. These work quite well because of all the bright colours used in the graphic design and the paper consistency being quite thick and glossy. I usually make a perfect flower (or snowflake) shape with this design but didn't have a long-arm stapler to hand so had to staple along the length of the strips of paper instead of across the middle. However we all thought that the suggestion of a tree-of-life design was a nice decorative and seasonal theme which I elaborated on in my second test piece.

To make these all you need to do is cut 1" (2.5cm) wide strips of paper widthways along a page or sheet, stack them and one at a time curve the ends into the middle and secure with a little double sided tape.

A lovely bird motif with a hand painted beak was cut from craft foam and glued onto a wooden board to make a stamp for cards and wrapping paper.

To make a snow globe all you need is a jar with lid and something to seal it with, water with some glycerin added which allows the glitter to fall at a slower pace, some putty to secure your chosen object, paint to cover the putty and something to put inside your jar like this super festive...er...crocodile!

I also spent a weekend and some evenings making batches of edible gifts that included cheesy stars, ginger and orange stuffed dates dipped in chocolate and Xmas fruit biscotti. I packaged these in lots of 10 in cellophane bags, tied with wrapping ribbon and gave them out to friends and family over the holidays. These went down remarkably well with lots of positive feedback (pardon the puns) so I now feel inspired to bake for birthdays and other occasions throughout the year, as gifts that my budget can afford but show the thought and care that the recipients deserve.

When you've crafted, created, made and / or baked gifts for people it's always a nice finishing touch to present them in a creative way. Hayley showed us how to make these fabulous paper bags from newspaper which she then sprays a motif on the sides to suit the occasion. It was a little tricky for us first timers but well worth it. Should you wish to learn this skill for yourselves please visit www.youtube.com RENEW(HOW TO MAKE NEWSPAPER BAG):GLUE VERSION, there is also a STAPLE VERSION. There are many different ways to make newspaper gift bags online but I particularly liked these ones because they provide a simple solution to reinforcing the handles so heavier items can be carried.

The next Material Knowledge session will be on Monday 4th February 6-8pm, The Art Studio, Level 2, St Luke's Community Centre, 90 Central Street, London, EC1V 8AJ.

The floor will be open at the beginning of the session for anyone who would like to participate in a crit, these will be held monthly from now on and will be on a first come, first served basis, the rest of the session will involve discussion about the coming year and activities relating to Colour.

Lonely Laboratory Seeks Exciting Experiments

The Material Knowledge Laboratory has been a little lonely of late; it lives to answer creative questions but is not being asked.

So, dear reader, I am asking YOU, what creative avenue would you like to see explored next? What could be valuable and applicable to your own practice and/or arts education delivery? Is there an issue or subject matter that you could benefit from reading about here? Would a crit be of use? Would a conversation about managing the balance between personal desires to be creatively fulfilled and the practical necessity of paying the bills be advantageous?! (ALWAYS!)

The Material Knowledge Laboratory is poised and ready to accept all and any creative questions and challenges! Send your comments and suggestions via this blog, by email; andrea_taylor_1@hotmail.com or even by post! (Address below headed Material Knowledge c/o Andrea Taylor) but PLEASE whatever you do send them as it's not nice to see a grown laboratory cry.

While you muse over what to request of the MK Lab, please read on for the findings and results of November's experiments. This session's work took on October's design a modular chair challenge and played with it.
 

I started with 4 triangular elements from last month's geodesic dome exercise. 1 flat, 1 with 1 side folded, 1 with 2 sides folded and 1 with all three sides folded.

 

 

 

Using split pins to secure the cardboard modules, this multi-functional stool or side table was constructed using 1 triangle with all three sides folded and 3 triangles with 2 sides folded. 3 legs is a good number for furniture because it's more stable and not prone to the wobble which can occur with it's 4 legged counterparts.

 



 

Duplicates of this design are stackable, making them easier to store. As a sustainable designer-maker, I always use the Ecodesign model that considers; Material Extraction , Production, Distribution, Use and Disposal.

 

 

 

This matching chair was made using 2 triangles (back and back leg) with all 3 sides folded and 3 triangles with 2 sides folded. All of the designs produced were a result of essentially sketching in 3D, this freedom allows ideas to form and be acted upon quickly, showing which are worth pursuing to the next phase of the design process. I would be inclined to build a scale model next, then full size prototype and then actual piece, reflecting and acting with the materials and using a sketchbook all the way through to and beyond completion.

 

 

After over an hour of playing with straight edges, I thought it would be nice to introduce a curve into the mix and imagined how luxurious sinking back into this chair would feel with comforting support for my legs. This recliner is composed of 6 triangles and a curve.

 

 

I also liked the way this functional object looked from all angles. Form follows function and if you're lucky you have an object that is both a pleasure to look at and to use.

 

 

 So there we have it, with a little time and imagination the challenge was met and not just a chair but the beginnings of a whole range of furniture was created.

 

Whilst building the objects, I thought about the concept behind them too. It could be interesting to produce the modules and have some basic designs but that really a consumer could engage with this on a whole new flat-pack level, not just reproducing but inventing their own combinations and then sharing them online.

 

The modules could be made from a sustainable material (e.g. recycled cardboard - could the packaging and the product be one and the same? - or sustainable ply), producing modules with straight edges decreases the amount of waste and a limited type of modules means less production set-up, flat pack articles are more eco-friendly to transport because they are more space efficient. If a module got broken or damaged, it could be replaced with another, making the item repairable and adaptable. At the end of the products life, as no matter how well made or loved an object is, nothing lasts forever, the modules could be dismantled and either re-used, recycled or allowed to bio-degrade back into the grand design.

 

 

The next Material Knowledge session will be on Monday 03rd December, 6-8pm, The Art Studio, Level 2, St Luke's Community Centre, London, EC1V 8AJ. With Christmas hurtling it's way towards us at an alarming rate there will be a festive crafts theme so please feel free to bring any items that may come in useful (and some booze and nibbles!)

  

For those interested in exploring cardboard furniture further I recommend www.foldschool.com

 







 







Plucky Bucky

October's Material Knowledge session continued exploring modular structures and was inspired by one of the most famous modular structure designs - the Geodesic Dome

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesic_dome

A geodesic dome is usually made up of a number of triangle shaped modules that are not all the same. These triangles can be a frame with a membrane placed over the top or solid. An example is the Epcot (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) Centre housed within the Walt Disney theme park complex, Florida USA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epcot_Centre

This invention is usually accredited to the design legend Buckminster Fuller (Bucky) as it was his modified design on an earlier version that was granted a US patent and popularised.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller

After several personal disaster's Buckminster abandoned the mantra of his upbringing "Never mind what you think. Listen. We are trying to teach you!" (1) and committed his life's work to the benefit of all humanity through a process of personal observation and experimentation. Learning most from his mistakes and funding his work through spontaneous offers from interested parties, he never promoted or sold his ideas or allowed others to do so. He believed that if a genuine need for his inventions existed they would be integrated into human affairs by evolution. If no need existed, he would conclude that what he had invented must be the wrong thing and try again. 

With the awareness that not all of the triangles should be the same for a geodesic dome, we cut and started to attach triangle modules made out of cardboard to observe what happens if they are. Making and attaching our modules was quite a labour intensive process, with only two of us working on this project in a 2hr time limit.

However in this time we learned that the structure had more flexibility with the joints on the outside and is more rigid with the joints on the inside. This observation could be applied to suit the need of a particular project. As the structure grew, it became obvious that the double sided tape being used was not strong enough to hold it, so wanting to carry on building with these modules next month,  I recommend using split pins on both ends of the edge for a stronger bond. The advantage of these is that you can dismantle the structure afterwards and use the modules and pins to build another shape. 

Different shapes start to suggest themselves and a chair like structure appeared, however this would need more design work in order to make it function better as well as be aesthetically pleasing. A challenge for November! With good design, form (or aesthetics) should always follow function. This is because for something to really work for us style, however important or desirable, is not enough.

So we may not have built a geodesic dome but we did learn through observation and experimentation, or reflection in action, basic principles that could inform more complex and longer projects in the future. This wasn't our intended outcome but still a very positive one that embraces both Buckminster Fuller's and the Material Knowledge ethos.

There are many geodesic dome projects shown on youtube including a posting by Playground Science that shows how to make a geodesic dome from newspaper.

The next Material Knowledge session will be on Monday 5th November 6-8pm in the Art Studio, Level 2, St Luke's Community Centre, London, EC1V 8AJ

1. R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path, Hutchinson, 1981, page 123.

Modular Structures

The Autumn Material Knowledge term started on Monday 10th September by exploring modular building. This is an easy way to construct quickly and can utilise multiples of existing and found objects or you can create your own.

When browsing for materials for this session I was immediately drawn  to some contrasting blocks of plasticine. My inner child squealed with delight at the prospect of handling this wonderful material again and my artist educator agreed that this was a practical choice that could be applied to a broad range of projects, ages and abilities. This childhood classic allows a tactile 3D experience with minimal mess and comes in a great range of colours showing the movement of the makers hand embedded in the object.

I rolled 21 white balls and 21 black balls to begin with and using cocktail sticks to join them together started assembling. I recommend using a board so that projects can be easily transported to safe storage. I had no fixed idea of what I was going to make when the basic framework of a chair appeared.

I could easily take this idea  and explore designing a whole range of modular furniture for practical use. Flat-pack furniture need not reside at the lower end of consumer design as there are many things to celebrate including interaction, interchangeability and the eco-friendly way that it is transported using minimal space for packaging. However this quickly evolved into a small scale sculptural piece.

Apparently a very similar technique using marshmallows and dried spaghetti sticks is used in schools to see who can build the tallest tower in design classes!

I am very glad to say that we had our first community centre user join us for this session who, along with one of our artist educators looked a duplicating a modular paper origami design.

Working alongside each other, our centre user and artist educator learned how to make the individual components with one sticking to a replica of the original and the other scaling up the project with the idea of producing a collaborative piece of work with a class of approximately 30 primary school children.

By using modular units and a bigger scale, collaboration is built into the technique and a large piece of work can be produced. There is also a positive message of each individuals contributuion being important to create a greater whole being taught and experienced.

This session is directly informing this artist educator in helping to devise and practice sessions for the classroom which is one of the core reasons for it taking place.

Another of our artist educators was inspired by a found object to figure out how it may have been constructed and with a good deal of concentration and experimentation produced a very pleasing prototype by the end of the class.

The next session will take place on Monday 08th October 6-8pm @ St Luke's Art Studio, Level 2, 90 Central Street, EC1V 8AJ.

We will be continuing with the Modular Structures theme so please bring cardboard, paper and/or collected found units such as bottle tops with you for use.

Alternatively, if you wish to work on a personal project in this social and informal environment then please feel free to bring your own activity and a mind to share.