Artmaking is a way to explore themes and concepts expressed in works of art. The creative process supports the individuality of each maker through experimentation and self-expression.
Each workshop contains a video that demonstrates the artmaking activity. The video can be watched before you begin artmaking, or it can be watched while you make, with participants following along. We encourage you to pause or rewind as required.
Each artmaking activity has been piloted in our regular Art and Dementia programs both onsite and online. Participant feedback allows us to refine each activity before committing it to the Making It resource.
Artmaking activities are developed in accordance with research surrounding Dementia-based practices. Each activity is made up of three simple steps, and individual participants can determine the complexity of the activity according to their own ability and skill.
Tips to remember:
Tip to encourage a first mark:
Hi, I'm Adriane and welcome to the National Gallery of Australia.
This Making It activity is called On the Horizon and is inspired by two artists on display in the Australian galleries.
The first is this painting by Fred Williams called Lysterfield Triptych. Notice these vertical lines in the foreground, or really at the bottom of the painting, and see how the artist uses diminishing scale to create a sense of distance on the horizon. Now I'm sitting in front of the second work of art.
Rosalie Gascoigne's, Suddenly the Lake. This work connects with the Canberra/Kanberri region. The artist used the landscape as inspiration, traveling around, collecting materials and then reworking them in her studio. The four panels in Suddenly the lake reworked the same materials in new combinations.
In this panel, the artist frames the ground and the sky with two triangular forms.
Now there is a foreground, a midground, and a background, the sky. I will demonstrate one way you can do this activity, but please, I encourage you to follow your own path. You will need two pieces of paper and I'm using coloured paper today; A light blue and a grey.
I have a very large box of coloured pencils, but I've just made a smaller selection here in front of me; a range of green colours and some kind of purply blues.
I have a pencil sharpener and also a glue stick.
You can participate alongside me and pause this video at any time. The first thing I'm going to do is draw a horizon line and I'm going to use this quite dark greeny colour. I've chosen to do a horizontal landscape in the same way as both Fred Williams and Rosalie Gascoigne, and I'm going to just draw a really wiggly series of valleys and hills across my paper.
Okay. Now, a little trick that we're going to use. I'm just going to put a dot approximately in the middle of this horizon line, and I'm just really roughly going to draw some radiating lines from that spot.
And then I'm going to use this range of green colours to just add colour across this grey paper.
And you can see that I don't have to cover every part of it because the grey is also working as a colour.
Just following these lines as a guide, just helps me direct my strokes kind of all in the same direction and I'm vaguely doing darker colours further away from the horizon. I can add more colours later to the bottom half of the work, But now I'm going to do the sky.
I'm going to use the same technique. Going to just use this pinky colour to kind of go from the same dot and I'm just drawing myself some radiating lines. Again, just as a guide.
I have done this before, but every time I do it, it's different. So now you can see that I have a sky. And also a ground.
And now for step number two. I'm going to turn my paper on its side and using my nail, I'm going to really carefully rip along this horizon line. I'm not going to worry too much if I go over or under. That will be all part of the charm.
I've got the glue stick in case I have any major mishaps Ah-ha.
So now I have two pieces. The sky and the ground and this is where our other piece of paper comes in. I'm going to create a foreground and a midground using these two pieces. I'm going to arrange them and see which one I prefer to be at the front and which one I prefer to be behind. When I'm happy with the placement I'm going to stick them both down onto this second piece of paper. I'm going to start with the background.
I'm not going to press too hard in case I haven't put it in quite the right place.
So now I have a much more complicated landscape. I've got this foreground and I have a background.
What I'm going to show you now is how we can use scale to increase this sense of distance I've got these three kind of darker pencils, and I'm going to start by making some vertical lines in the foreground and as I get further away, I'm going to start creating some smaller shapes and also some horizontal ones. As if these objects are in the distance.
Even though this sky that we have, this area of sky, is light blue, we could go back into this area and using white, add some clouds.
This is a kind of activity you can keep experimenting with because every time you add a new colour, it'll affect what's already there.
I’ve put this vertical line or this vertical shape in the foreground.
It helps your eye to travel up and to discover these smaller marks, which create a sense of distance towards the horizon.
Thanks for joining me.