Art Farm Preparing for Fall Line-Up of Classes

Art Farm's summer camp season 2010 came to a nice closing Aug. 15 with a great group of students. Thanks again to my wonderful staff: painting instructor Kris Finch; natural sciences instructor Jennifer Stowe; camp aides Emerson Coman, Max Giffen; AnneMarie Delfino; Erica Barrett, and Rachel Mehrberg. Thanks also to the San Diego Humane Society for bringing an array of animal ambassadors to share with students.

I enjoyed teaching introduction to charcoal teaching. At right is a fine drawing by Rose Wilkinson, age 11.

For Whom the Carlsbad Art Farm Bell Tolls

We have just completed Session Two at Carlsbad Art Farm. Pictured here are campers and staff under the school bell (originally from my husband's family farm in Michigan). Click on image to enlarge.

It was a great week! Students kept busy making and filling nature journals, making animal soap, learning acyclic, charcoal, and pen-and-ink watercolor techniques.

They observed nature and animals, which they used to create art. Some guest models this week included "Lizzy" an extra jumbo-sized San Diego Alligator lizard and Molasses, a species of endangered dessert tortoise.

Picasso, our miniature mule, posed handsomely. Kandinsky, our $20 rescue goat, was, as usual, a delightful goofball (she ate my demonstration drawing, much to the amusement of my students). Our alpacas, Harry Potter and Mr. Weasely, allowed their fuzzy necks to be hugged as they were led about on leashes. Hilda, the camp dog, kept kids entertained as she continues to dig her ever-growing tunnel beneath a fallen tree stump. We're not sure where she's going.

Then there are the free-range chickens that wander through camp looking for bugs and worms. Students enjoy finding their eggs. Big favorites are Maude, Feathers, Patriot, and Egg Nog.

Our weekly Friday All Camp BBQ in the woods, to which we invite family, siblings and friends, was a big success. We cooked 65 giant hotdogs, 18 veggie burgers, and 80 ears of corn. Campers helped with the setting of tables. Parents had a chance to hangout at the campsite where they could admire their children's art and simply enjoy the beautiful setting.

Camps continue all summer into mid-August. All information is available online at our website under the "Camp" tab. Scroll to the bottom to find enrollment and other required forms. The enrollment form includes session dates. For mid-season session availability, email the director Perrin Weston (that would be me) at director@carlsbadartfarm.com.

Getting Ready for Campers at Carlsbad Art Farm

With summer sessions starting next week, we are in full preparation mode here at Carlsbad Art Farm. That means getting our animal models ready for their close-ups, mowing many acres of weeds, setting up our outdoor studios, trimming some huge palm trees, and going over our art supplies order.

Enrollment for Art Farm continues throughout the summer. For session dates and enrollment forms, visit CarlsbadArtFarm.com and click the "Camp" tab.

Pictured here are some campers from last summer learning how artists go about drawing an animal - from initial sketch to finished drawing. We start by teaching basic animal structure. Once they understand that most mammals have the same basic bone structure with variations, it's a small step to being able to draw most any animal.

We use a lot of charcoal for drawing. It's smudgyness gets children away from a fear of getting a line wrong. Sometimes we get children who are absolutely wedded to their erasers. They will draw a line, fret that its not perfect, erase it, try again, fret, erase it, try again, fret . . . you get the idea. One way we deal with this is by taking away the erasers until the drawing is nearly finished. Charcoal is an imprecise medium. Lines can be sharp or blurred, light or very dark. Using charcoal, children begin to appreciate that making a likeness of an animal -- or any other object -- is not about technical perfection but about capturing it's essence. Charcoal drawings have a sense of movement, a quality that is ideal for drawing animals, trees with fluttering leaves, passing clouds, etc.

The class pictured here shows children working on "art horses". These are benches with a vertical board at the end on which they can lean their drawing boards (sort of like an easel you can sit on). This allows them to observe the model while drawing with correct form.

The sheep makes a good live model because it is busy grazing and tends not to move much. Drawing live animals requires close observation because the animal will move so you must hold a memory of a pose. Repeated attempts to draw the live animal enforce this memory.

A good place to practice drawing exotic animals is the zoo or wild animal park. Next time you take your child artist to the zoo, bring along a good-quality sketch pad and some soft lead art pencils (3B or 4B). Show your child that you are not fearful of making mistakes (even if you are!) by bringing along a pad and pencils for yourself. Know ahead of time which animals you want to draw to avoid the, "What do you want to draw?" "I don't know," merry-go-round. The idea is to go with a sense of purpose and to hit the ground running.

The petting zoo is a good place to draw because the animals are close up. Your child's attempts at drawing will be positively reinforced by other zoo guests who are charmed by the sight of a child drawing with a parent (and by other children who are slightly jealous that they didn't bring drawing supplies).

Geordie Millar's Giant Walking Moose

Wow. I'm stunned. As you may have ascertained by now, I like drawing animals and I like drawings of animals.

Furthermore, I have a lifelong affinity for charcoal. Just love the stuff. I use it in the classroom all the time because I think it helps to loosen up students who are too wedded to the precision of line they get from a pencil (not to mention their over-dependency on erasers). I want students to get their hands dirty, work large, and to risk smudging their paper with unintended marks.

So here I was, fishing around on the Internet, when I came across Canadian Artist Geordie Millar's Walking exhibit, which is a series of 16 huge (average size 60 X 76) charcoal on paper portraits of a single female moose walking, standing, lying down, turning, and so on. It's mesmerizing as a study of an animal and as art. The website set-up to showcase the exhibit is nicely done. Just click on any of the images scrolling by and take some time to appreciate the detail. Then recall that it's done in charcoal.

What I like very much about these drawings, as a teaching tool for young students, is that they show what drawing can be. The analogy I use with students is that learning to draw well is like learning to play an instrument. It takes time, dilligence, discipline and all the rest, but the reward is that with mastery comes very tangible results. But drawing from intense observation is also a form of meditation.

In his Artist's Statement about the "Walking" exhibit, Millar notes, "Are we comfortable around animals in the wild? No. Are they comfortable around us? No. This is one of the beautiful parts of life, simply because these glimpses are so vividly intense. One moose to draw and she's still a mystery to me after all these hours of drawing."

Art Work from Art Farm

I'm just now starting to sift through three-years worth of student art work with the daunting task of trying to choose what to put on my website gallery. I've photographed so many images. The work posted there will eventually represents a range of ages from students entering second-grade through middle school.

Seen here is a lovely charcoal rendering of a horse by a second-grader. Students at Art Farm work from live animal models in outdoor studios on our 10-acre reserve. By the time this student rendered this horse, she had spent studio time learning how to use charcoal media and studying some basic horse anatomy. Her class was shown a diagram of a horse skeleton, and we went over how the horse moves and why. We watched a short film clip showing a horse in motion, and another illustrating how artists through the ages have depicted horses.

By the time we brought in a live horse to draw, this student was well prepared to tackle her subject. One obstacle to overcome when drawing a live animal is that animal models tend to move. That is why having a good sense of how the animal is put together to begin with helps in the drawing of it.

In our studio classes at Art Farm, students work at special easels called "art horses" (familiar to anyone who has ever gone to an art college or university) which allow them to sit down while drawing from a model. The art horse also allows them to draw at a tilt with a good range of arm and hand motion while closely observing the model. This is incredibly important for many types of drawing.

You can see from this charcoal drawing that there is looseness and charm to the line style and smudging that is moving away from simple contour or "coloring book"-style drawing toward a greater sophistication of expression. Not every line has been erased because it was "imperfect" (in fact I often ban erasers from class). You can see the anatomy under the surface: the bones supporting the animal. There is a sense of volume in the belly. This student has been given a high-grade piece of charcoal paper that allows the texture of the rubbings to take hold on the surface in a way that cheap construction paper cannot. The horse looks alive because the drawing technique is fluid and alive. Also, it has the look of an object rendered from a live model.

This second-grader, like many students her age, was very excited to be taught how to observe an animal like an artist and then how to go about getting it down on paper.