Initial Ideas for a community project

Overall Theme

Our group really liked this theme we came up with within the School's art week theme of British Values. In our workshops we want the theme to be reoccurring, first by asking what culture means to the students and designing the workshops around it.  

Workshops/Activities:
These are some potential ideas for workshops to do with our community partner:

• Creating a stencil piece- For the stencil it would be a combination of our work and the children's. We would create a stencil using an image of something to do with culture, perhaps the shape of a flag as it would be nice to see loads of different cultures within the Union Jack. The children would work on top of the stencil, then when they are finished we would peel it back to reveal an image. This would be a nice idea as it combines our work and theirs and gives the students a more refined piece to take with them afterwards. It would also look like something directly related to culture which would tie in with our thee. Issues with this would be that creating the stencil would be quite time consuming and potentially complicated, as we'd need to figure out the right materials to make it out of and the correct size. It's a task very driven by us which the students may not like. This idea could he used for a final workshop which would give us time to prepare and plan it. 

• Creating artwork using recycled materials ( inspired by artist Tony Cragg) - This would be a really fun way to engage the children with environmental issues while also learning about a notable British artist. We could use things like plastic bottles and paper boxes and this idea would encourage the students to take an interest in their surroundings and the issues of litter and waste. The difficulties with this idea would be finding safe materials for them to use that would not be dangerous or harm them, materials such as glass and metal would have to be avoided. We'd also need quite a bit of space to carry out the workshop out as the objects might end up being large, which means it might be better if we were to do this to bring all the students together to create one big piece then either stick it down to paper or photograph it. 

• Screen printing workshop - With this we could use the student's own work to put on to screens, which they could then print on to paper in different colours and work on top of to give a new dimension to their work. We would teach them screen printing so they would gain a new skill and it would be a very hands on activity. There are quite a few issues with this idea, as screen printing is complicated and has a lot of steps it could be too advanced for the students to do or understand. Screens take a while to set up and if we can't get a hold of good quality pictures of the students artwork we wouldn't be able to get it done in time. This workshop idea ultimately might not be suitable to do with the age group we are teaching.

• Mono printing workshop- Another form of printing we could do is mono printing, the children probably haven't done this type of printing before and they are also doing printing at school so this would tie in nicely with our activities. This form of printing would be simple enough for the students to do and they would be able to produce a lot of work in a short period of time. We could provide different ink colours and have them create prints about whatever they wanted in the context of culture. A lot of mono prints have quite a loose style due to the way they are made, which means the students similar style of working would be perfect for the medium and it would be interesting to see how their outcomes turn out. After they have made all their prints we could combine them in some form, possibly on one big sheet or display. Some issues with this work may be that it could get very messy, however we can deal with that using tissues and aprons. Apart from that this workshop idea could be simple yet informative and fun for the students.