Ohika Collages and Assemblage

Today was a Professional Development day in the school district and instead of regular Friday lessons, Artspace ran full and half day camps. As I mentioned in a post this morning I taught campers a mixed media art exploration class.

We used the art of Magaly Ohika as a jumping off point for the day's project. Students used chalk pastels. painted papers, fabric scraps and yarn to create Ohika-esque figures. A handful of my campers took the opportunity to create purely from their own imaginations. 

Campers are split into groups based on age; With my older campers we turned the collage project into assemblage with the addition of circuit boards to the composition. I loved seeing how and where each camper placed the board into their art. 

My younger group focused on the collage aspect of the project. The project was fill of colour, pattern and texture. 

A Leaf Can Be Follow up and Pro D Camp Plans

I've got a Professional Development camp today. I'll be teaching a total of 23 artists today, using the artist Magaly Ohika as our inspiration. 

I love her work. I've been cyber stalking her distinctive art for years. Today I'll be sharing some of it with the campers and we'll be putting our own spin on it with some recycled electronic circuit boards. My plan is to shoot grouping of the artist's creations to share here. 

As promised here are the finished art pieces from my Arts Enrichment group. With a combination of oil pastel rubbings and painted applied to the leaves and stamped onto the paper I couldn't have been more pleased with the finished work. Since this age group has a focus on exploring and making art I was pleased to hear one of my favourite questions during the process:

Teacher, How do I make brown?

What followed was an experimentation of how many different shades of brown could be made using only yellow, green, red and orange. As you can see from the posted art here each of my students has a unique style to their art making already. The first picture in this set has a wonderful example of positive and negative space where the artist used the leaves to mask the paper while painting. Some of my other artists were more precise with their paint applications and rubbings. 

What ways do you use the autumn leaves in your art practice?