Summer Camp

I didn't go to camp during the summer when I was a kid.  I just spent my days riding my bike and playing around the neighborhood.  Times were different back then.  Now kids are booked all summer, at least out here in Los Angeles they are.  That's good for us, since we own a children's art studio.  We are booked all year with after-school art classes and booked all summer for our 1/2 day fine art camps (camps were full by May).  Each camp runs 4 days (Tuesday-Friday) from 9:00 - 1:00 pm.  We only take 12 kids, we like to keep it small and give them tons of attention.  It's a great gig.  We are done at 1:00 and have Saturday-Monday off.  This is the first time in 8 years of having the business that we are not having afternoon classes.  It's just too draining...working with kids is exhausting.  So we decided that this year we'd only have camps and it's working our great.

We are on our 5th week.  We can't believe how fast the summer is going.  We only have 7 more to go.  Our camps are very project oriented, we do some painting and drawing projects, but we also do a lot of mixed media projects like clay, paper mache, plaster, wire, printmaking, and other super cool projects.  I can honestly say that the projects we do are awesome.  Yesterday we did plaster frescos.  The kids had to mix their own plaster and put it on a piece of burlap.  Then they had to sketch out a design (something very simple always works best) and draw it onto the dried plaster.  Then they painted it with acrylics.  Once that was dry they did 2 layers of brown (watered down) acrylic on top of their piece to make it look a bit old and once that was dry they cracked it and covered it with white glue.  We then mounted them on black matboard.  They were so beautiful.

Today we did clay.  Kids love clay.  We try to make our projects fun and interesting and also allow the kids to be creative and expressive.  We don't tell them what to make, we want everyone to go home with a unique piece.  Bruce is such a wonderful teacher...so wonderful that when we tried to bring in another teacher to help with classes people complained and moved out of the class with the new teacher.  He is so enthusiastic and patient with the kids, it really makes kids love coming to the studio.  Today we did clay relief tiles - they were 6x6 and the kids could make anything on the tile that they wanted to, they just had to build it up (instead of carving into it).  They'll paint them on Friday.  Here is Bruce demonstrating the process (rolling coils, making things, scoring, adding water to make a slip so things don't fall off, which is a bummer, etc...)

The kids did some super cool tiles.  They are all so creative.  It's really great because the kids that come to us LOVE art.  We have some kids that return each year just for camp.

After clay, we set up 2 still-lifes and did a drawing project.  The kids chose a color of chalk pastel and first toned their paper.  Then with charcoal they had to draw what object was in front of them, then they added shadow and then white conte for highlight.  These pieces turned out great! 

Stella came with us today, we road our bikes so she was in the carrier.  I counted the smiles on the way to and from the studio - total 16.   

We are really enjoying our summer, although we are counting down the weeks until we go back to France.  We'll have 144 kids pass through the studio this summer, all of them making amazing art.  Life's good.