I've been quietly toiling. Not much blog-worthy in this last part of my summer except for a few choice treats I found on the web

mail art beckoning again

fancy Leonardo da Vinci sites like Universal Leonardo and this one or his sketchbook

fancy Van Gogh site with all the drawings including this one of Sein sewing

fancy sketchbooks

a new website from the American Artist magazine people and even though it seems damn foolish to pay $50 to try to get your drawing or watercolor or what-have-you on the cover of one of these magazines, there are some good things in here especially if you are new to drawing I ought to be saying more in this forum soon but for now it is simply, goodnight, Rachael

Hello all,
Sorry I've been silent in this forum for a couple of weeks. It's been a wacky late summer for me and my day job. Last week we hosted our amazing 8 year old neice and did experiments with Diet Coke and mentos in the backyard, played a lot of Sorry, and generally had fun every day. And then I've recently been working on some new ideas in my paintings (lines and more tra-la-la-lines that curl into each other and seek to capture the sound of a tongue rolling an R as in Italian...) and then working on planning that looking at art class that starts next week...Busy.

Yet, I finally have some good content for you and that's my crib sheet based on about 5 years of teaching cartooning classes to 8 to 12 year olds, watching other great teachers do the same, listening to a bunch of kids who want to learn, and my own experience as a kid who will always want to draw funny pictures, tell stories with pictures and words, and spend my days making and reading comics. Below are the basics of what I know.



THE BASICS
Always have lots of white paper in a variety of sizes, lots of regular #2 pencils and ebony pencils, more than one pencil sharpener (either the good electric ones or the nice metal ones), and lots of erasers (the white rubber ones work great). It's also a great idea to have magic markers, scissors, glue, staplers, and rulers around.

Foster a cartooning room where everyone works collaboratively not competitively. Reinforce in your own way that all cartoonists are getting better always. Collaborative projects are a lot of fun and can let kids switch roles and draw things they are not alsways drawing.

Do whatever you have to do to keep the room creative. Use the element of surprise. Encourage the telling of goofy (clean) jokes.

All kids can draw. All kids have great stories to tell. Some kids instinctively know this or know this from practice, other kids will appreciate discovering these truths about themselves.

Be relaxed, have fun and the kids will too.

I used to emphasize drawing from nature, using thumbnail sketches, and revising (penciling)an idea until it was drawn better, made more interesting for the reader, and ready to be finished (inked).

There is a logic to how comics work and luckily other people have put it in clear english. Here is How cartoons work and E.H. Gombrich's classic article about caricature. You can read these and share the best parts (the relevant stuff) with your students.

I love showing kids good comics, cartoons, drawings and what not like those by Will Eisner, Charles Barsotti, Lyonel Feininger, (more good stuff on Feininger's comics are here ), Saul Steinberg, Charles Schulz, and many more.

PROJECTS THAT I KNOW WORK:

Animating a simple thing. Kids practice turning ordinary objects (even plain shapes) into characters by animating them with personalities, faces, bodies, even voices.

Starting with lines and ending with stories. In this project kids start by drawing as many different kids of lines as they can with as many tools they can find on the table (pens, pencils, charcoal, etc). After filling a big sheet of paper with lines they identify the three or four they want to use to draw (no words) a story with a character, something happening, and an end.

Mini comics. We turned regular 8.5x 11 sheet of white cardstock into an 8 panel mini comic with the magic of doublesided photocopiers. Basically I use this template.

Asking kids to brainstorm a list of nouns and verbs and adjectives which they all write of slips of white paper and then put them in a bag or hat and in groups of two or three they pick a noun, verb, and adjective out of the bag and have some time to turn those three elements into a good story, refine it and draw it.

There are helpful handouts showing cartooning principles (like expressive faces or thought and voice bubbles and other elements) but I encourage challenging children to make their own. Pair kids with a similar level of confidence in their drawing ability together to come up with their own faces and elements.

There's more of course and I will put more up when I can but cartoons and comics and kids and creativity doesn't need too many rules...

try it and let me know how it works for you!
best,
Rachael

Feels a bit selfish of me to be spending my evenings looking ta art and not sharing much of them so here's a bit:

Thanks to Jan Vermeer, this tired woman has me thinking more about why artists portray those asleep. There is an abandon when we sleep, we are gone from conscious thought and at our most unguarded. The drammatically accented (fashionable?) widow's peak points us down the bridge of her nose and into the point of her chin and the cut of her blouse. She sleeps, we are absorbed. More essential Vermeerstuff for you.

I've been looking at Islamic calligraphy (particularly as it appears on ceramics) and wondering how a kid like me with little knowledge about Islam, about the meaning of these, can gather any undertanding of the importance of these lines. The grace, the flow, the seamless, intertwining and winding truth...but what does it say? So, now I will begin to piece it together from helpful bits like this reading list and this essay about the calligraphy, and the collection at the Louvreand in Detroit and at the Sackler Freer and at the Met's Timeline of Art History.

And now, I'm headed upstairs for a bit of painting (calligraphic patterns maybe? or sleeping people or some combination of the both?) and some rest.
Take care,
Rachael

My reading and thinking about art have reached a fever pitch again even if my blogging has slowed down. I signed up to teach a class in the fall to non-art majors and am now spending my non work hours working on compiling loads of resources, ideas and most importantly, images for their (and my) benefit. I'm looking at how we look and thinking about how best to introduce the practice of looking slowly, looking with passion, and looking with relevance to one's own life. It's actually a lot of fun and a great balance to my mostly manage-y summer and my art making.

In my visual travels around the web, I keep finding great stuff to look at. Here are a couple of today's favorites...

The flip flop car

A gorgeous frenetic yellowy orange sideboard by Cezanne (and more from that show last year)

A yummy Richter painting of branches but mostly of color

A Thomas Struth photo of Bellini's glory in context, not faith as much as tourism but it is truly magic

In other news: the paper dolls are still taking form, I'm drawing strangers, and the garden is producing (cucumbers and still green tomatoes).

take care,
Rachael

About 20 years ago I started drawing my own friends. After drawing all sorts of characters for all sorts of years, I started to collage and then draw an odd bird,a strange gal, a wierd young lady I named Janet Groundhog. Janet was the public question answer girl at the Eggville Public Library. I drew her as a little bit like me and a lot like my real friends and a lot like a young woman coming into her own with other people and ideas.

Her stories appeared in the little zine I made from 1995 or 6 until 2002, Trustworthy. Trustworthy started when I was an art history graduate student essentially looking for an excuse to be creative, collaborative, goofy, and to make small pieces of pretty and slightly subversive writing and drawing.


Janet's stories were amalgams of my own stories and those I dreamed up. She lied to impress her summer camp friends, she fell in love with a tree scholar and grew restless, she impulsively set root in a Vermont town. She figured out, or rather, I figured out (through drawing her and writing out her stories and sending them out all over the country on a semi-regular basis) some core ideas about place, people, and memory.












And Janet started writing more ( I wanted to have her write a bodice-ripper but never did) and I started painting more. I've been thinking of more Janet stories but I really haven't been drawing her. I'm about to close my old old old email account which is all spam but which has the first website I ever made and that holds the Janet and trustworthy stuff, so I thought I'd put it on this lblog simply so she doesn't completely fade into complete obscurity because, well, she's still one of my favorite imaginary people.

I may still finish the Janet story or breathe some new life into her, but in the meantime, enjoy what pops up here and be nice to everyone you meet on the street as Janet Groundhog would have you do.
take care,
Rachael