imaginary family portrait

Today was the first day of my last summer workshop at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. Entitled “Castles in the Sky, Creatures Flying High,” the idea for the week is for kids to create their own world, their own kingdom, via lots of designing and drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and of course, art-making games that might begin with a prompt. The stamps above are stamps I made a few years back, which I’ve used in lots of classes as a fun, out-of-the-box way to draw “portraits.” I thought that a good way to begin designing a kingdom would be by designing the people or creatures that live there; the founding family, the warriors that invaded, the aliens that inhabit some planet somewhere, whatever came to mind…

The kids selected their stamps and made prints,

then added details with markers and crayons

and added names.

They created humans,

design-y figures

that were created with bold color and shape.

And they created variations of their own human families.

It was a great first day for the creation of many new worlds.