Herve Tullet Inspired Art Club
Last week at the end of art club, I felt that the kids were trying to make their fields of flowers look too much like either the photographs we were using as references or the traditional graphic ideas that they have about how a flower is suppose to look. I decided that perhaps a little art activity would get them out of what they thought they “should” be doing and into finding how they could communicate an impression of a field of flowers.
I had picked up the book Art Workshops for Children by Herve Tullet from the East Hampton Libary. If you don’t know who Herve Tullet is, it might help if I told you he wrote and illustrated Press Here — a fun book that has an amazing amount of interaction for a book that is full of dots.
The first workshop that is included in this book, is called a Field of Flowers. I had hoped that we would have enough time to do it at the end of our Impressionist Art session to show how Impressionism has influenced our art today. But luckily it worked to do it as a “Let’s change how you are thinking about art” activity.
The workshop has you roll out a roll of paper and take poster paint (tempera paint) to play with dots, shapes, swirls, etc. Each person gets one color of paint and a brush. Then the facilitator starts by asking them to paint a tiny dot. Then switch places. The instructions go on to have you do a larger dot and then an even larger dot, all sizes of circles, swirls, dots on dots, dots inside circles, and dots around circles. The whole time switching places between each thing you paint. Then he has you stop and look and ask, “What does this painting need?” Then he gives you 30 seconds to add what it needs. Then you go back and start looking for flowers and you add stems and leaves to make flowers. At one point, everyone was quiet and thoughtfully painting. The kids even commented on how quiet it was.
It was a fun time. I had been looking for a group of kids to try this out on. After we were done cleaning up brushes, we sat down and talked about it. We decided that a few of our paintings were muddy. Next time, I’m going to get larger paper and roll out more paper per student. I think we just ran out of space to paint. I am also going to buy more colors of paint. I had a few colors that I then mixed together to make more colors and I think it would be better to have vibrant colors straight out of the bottles. The circles and dots and swirls were on top of each other so much that there wasn’t a lot of negative space. I could have also stopped having the kids paint earlier. I can’t wait to try it again with another group of people. I think all ages of people would have a great time doing this. If you have a group of people you want to try this out with, I’m your lady!
I think the activity did what I wanted it to do: give the kids permission to think outside of the artist box. I had a couple of students change how they were approaching the Impressionist Field of Flowers assignment. At least 2 decided to start over and painted over their canvas boards. I told them that lots of artist paint over their canvas boards. Even famous artists who have their work in museums have a painted over their canvases.