This month we had the exciting opportunity to be part of a global project within organisation Creative Junction’s ‘Create Compete Collaborate’ (CCC) network. The project will culminate in an outdoor art piece that will coincide with the Paralympic Games. Lead artists of the project Rachel Gadsden and Mark Smith will not only be working with CMAP in Ecuador and Brazil, but organisation in the UK, USA, Australia, Cambodia and South Africa!
Here, our part of the project has run during the children’s school holidays as part of ‘Colonia Vacacional’ – three weeks of different activities provided by all the Juconi team. Taking inspiration from CCC’s themes and online community, we focused our project in Colonia Vacacional on Movement in Art.

We started by looking at rapid art techniques and different ways of presenting movement in drawing, and emotion through colour. We were keen to encourage the children to free up their inhibitions when drawing, so first presented them with quick fire, messy drawing challenges (‘desafíos’) – primarily using charcoal and coloured pastels as our weapons of choice!

The challenge was to fill the page, starting at arrow 1 on the right of the page and ending at the second arrow on the left, with one single line. The pages all line up to create one long line created by the whole group!

This challenge was to draw your partner using only one line, ie not taking your pen pff the paper, within the one minute timer

This challenge was to transfer the movement we were watching onto the page in front of us, again with a one minute timer. Whilst one person moved/danced the rest of us followed their movements with our pens.

The final challenge was to ‘Añadir solo un color’, or ‘add one colour’. The participants chose one of their impressionist drawings to add colour to, and then chose one colour pastel, giving a reason this colour suits the drawing.

Clink here to link to our Drawing Movement Video

We then continued our theme of movement by creating different types of marionette puppets, both 2D and 3D, and chose our favourite sports and sports people as a basis for the characters.

Some of the participants finished, articulated, 3D sportsmen puppets!

Next week marks the end of our CCC project and we will be having an exhibition open to the parents of participants, during which we are going to hold a puppet dance with our creations!

PHOTOS & VIDEOS COMING SOON!

So, our last week of art club for Erika and I, and of the year. It’s been such an amazing year in art club. We have been and are constantly impressed, extremely proud, amazed and surprised by all of the children of art club. They are all wonderful and we have seen how beneficial art club can be for them; as a space where they can be kids, be creative and have fun. The children run art club, they are art club, we are only there to support them, they decide how it goes, and what a great time they have shown us! With some days full of intensive concentration and other days where they just want to run around and paint the walls, tables and each other!!!

We have massively enjoyed our experience of running art club. We wanted to say a final thank you and to try and show how much we have enjoyed art club with them, so, we decided, since Christmas is coming up, to have a little Christmas party. We got the stereo in hand, prepared lots of bags of sweets, printed their certificates and Happy Christmas and New Year Photo cards we made for them (they absolutely love receiving photos of themselves, so we thought this would be a nice little gift) and we had four successful Christmas/end of year art club parties.

We began by playing some classic games like musical chairs and statues. Then they made their own Christmas crackers. At the end we had a little presentation where we gave them their certificates and filled their crackers with sweets. We introduced the lovely two new art club facilitators, Chloe and Rachel who the kids very quickly warmed to, and we said our goodbyes.

Words from Erika; “Gracias CMAP por confiar en nosotros y brindarnos también una linda experiencia, aprendimos bastante con el trabajo de los niños. A los niños, gracias por brindarlos alegría, amistad y cariño. Nos vamos muy contentas al conocer cada uno de ellos y sus habilidades en el arte. Y a CMAP por facilitarlos por este tan bonito labor.”

(“Thank you for putting faith in us CMAP and for providing us with such a great experience, we have learned so much from working with the children. Thank you to the children for bringing their joy, friendship and affection. We leave very happy to have known each of them and their skills in art. And, again, to CMAP for giving us such good work.”)

Thanks for such an amazing time CMAP and to all the children of art club for making this year the most fulfilling year ever, we will miss you!!