Welcome back!
Exciting News
These past few weeks have been quite hectic, but allowed me to bring back some good news! For the first time in over a year, we have decided to bring back our classes on campus! We have taken great precaution up until now to prepare for this day and are so excited to be back. Classes will be offered once a week for the time being, but once things pick up, we will be able to make more days available. For more information about either our Online or On-Campus classes, call us at 718 819 0004 or leave us an email at infolittleneck@ashcanart.com!
Challenging Ourselves
For today’s blog post, I wanted to showcase our students’ most recent project which included a few challenges. We love presenting challenges in our curriculum to have our students think outside of the box and develop useful skills. This week’s project was a watercolor painting on a circular wooden panel.
Instructor’s example
Above is Ms. Jackie’s example of this project. We had our students paint side profile portraits on circular wooden panels. Why did we choose a circular panel? We wanted to challenge our students to further develop their proportion skills. We are all used to drawing and painting on a rectangular canvas. We are also used to drawing front view portraits. We decided to take both of these aspects and alter them so that our students take a different perspective of things. We also introduced a new texture other than regular paper and had them paint with watercolor on wood. The surface of the wood was also much different than the normal watercolor paper our students are used to. It required a lot of patience and practice for them to get used to the surface and the way the paint reacted to the wood.
The students first sketched their profiles onto the wooden panels with pencil. They added as much detail as they could while observing their own faces in the mirror. Throughout the semester, we have finetuned our observation skills and you can see how much our students have improved by just their sketches shown below.
After the pencil sketches, we added the paint. Our students also worked quite a lot with watercolor paint and are now fairly skilled in mixing their desired colors, shades, and adjusting the water to paint ratios. Of course, painting on wood was a first, but regardless of all of these challenges, the final results were astonishing. Let’s take a look!
Being faced with challenges and working with new mediums is always difficult and frustrating at first. Although in this case we are speaking about art, there are many instances of challenges we face everyday. For some, it may be as simple as trying to finish eight cups of water each day, or as complex as starting a new career path.
I happen to have watched a series on Netflix called Navillera this past weekend. The series follows the challenges faced by a 70 year old retired mailman attempting to learn ballet despite his deteriorating Alzheimer’s condition. At the end of the series, the grandfather soars high up on stage notwithstanding his illness and is a beautiful inspiration to all.
I hope our students’ work was in any way an inspiration to you as well.