Still life with beautiful vegetables. We enjoyed all the curves, shadows, bumps, holes, lines. Some vegetables are really like planets. Such surface. It was a fantastic workshop. 
Robotic worlds
Children themselves were bagging for this project.
Kids firstly drew their robots like we usually do, a little study. Then they talked about them pretty intensely, how do they look, what can they do, they also gave them names of course. There was a lot of talking about lasers, eyes lasers, finger lasers, no idea, I was totally lost. Then gluing and assembling took part and cute little robots were born. I mean assembled. Produced. Built. Engineered. Whoever cares!
Drawing the birds
We love Piggy and elephant books at our mini classes. We read There is a bird on your head. So what else can you do than draw birds on each other’s heads? I choose birds because these are pretty small children and drawing is still quite a big deal and a challenge. Birds are fairly easy. And they really did good!
Old tights sculpture and Gustavo Peñalver Vico
We talked about a living artist. Finally! Gustavo Peñalver Vico. There are at least two buildings with his art on Berlin’s skyscrapers. When I saw them I thought it’s such a simple and clear drawing with all of those divided forms and colours. Kids would love it!
Each child got quite a thick piece of wood with attached wire which they formed as they wanted. After they dragged old tights over the wire and grounded them, letting them dry. In the following two classes the drawing, painting and lining started. Results are lovely!
Flying engineered sculptures
This was an amazing project with a great story behind. I would love it to be mine but it wasn’t. I fully found it on Small hands big art, my favourite of all creative pages.
Children engineered flying objects. First they drew a sketch and a whole planning. They were offered certain materials and a photo of themselves to put in the flying pit.
Big stories came out of all this and there were giggles from behind and under the tables. These girls!
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Paul Klee visited
I found this chalk pastel project somewhere on internet. It was great to use the pastels and the project was just lovely.
The children couldn’t wait to come as far as to smear the pastels and they did it with such joy when they were finally and officaly allowed to.
I will definitely be coming back to this or similar projects.
Wired sculptures
This was such a fun project, an open art play. Children were very busy and they wouldn’t stop really. So much concentration and patience. Great work!
Inside my head
As an upgrade to the previous project, Inside and outside of the houses, we talked about ourselves and our inner self. How do we look and what is happening in our minds, what are our favourite things, what do we like to do most, what we don’t like doing, maybe our favourable memory. Our inspiration was a book by Laurent Moreau, Woran denkst du.
Children drew their self-portraits on one watercolour paper and inside their heads on another. They first used pencils (gentle is THE word!), then markers and then they were taught how to use real aquarells. Aquarells were a little challenging but they opened door into a very interesting lesson. They are so very beautiful and playful, children love them! Since time was on our side all the children slowly reached towards understanding of these special paints and the results are all but unsuccessful!
Inside and outside of the houses
I have a book that I find pretty amazing. It’s called Woran denkst du?. I wished to do a project on the subject but since it’s quite abstract I decided to start with a similar project only instead of drawing our mind we drew houses. Houses are easy. We all have one, live in one, have someone living in one that we visit and so on. So we did it. We drew sinks, bedrooms, tables, stairs, spooky basements and all the rest that goes with it. As an extra inspiration we used a very nice book called Zuhause by Carson Ellis.
Cylindrical shape and preserved memories
This was such a cool project. I had an excuse to buy beautiful big old jars we used for drawing. Children needed to observe the form, jar’s opening and jar’s bottom. When the form was in place we spoke about the most valuable memory the children could think of. This project was an inspiration from Small hands big art blog (thank you for this valuable and rich idea!).
The hardest thing was to place the memory into the jar making it stand and not float and also what happens with the sky or the colour of the room in the jar’s opening.
I did this project with a group of mostly 6 years old children and with the group of 8+. Very pretty results I would say.
