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:
Hello, I'm Harriet.
I'm sitting in the National Gallery sculpture Garden in front of a work of art by Anthony Gomley called Angel of the North.
This is one of the works of art that will be inspiring the art making activity that I'm about to demonstrate.
The other two are in flight by Ildiko Kovacs and Biplane by Yvonne Koolmatrie,
All three of these works of art are interested in the idea of flying or being in flight.
So, for this activity you will need some coloured oil pastels.
You could also use coloured pencils or textures. They'd work fine.
I really like oil pastels because they give a really immediate, colourful and vibrant result and you'll also need two sheets of a four paper.
The first thing we are going to do is make our oil pastel pencil texture fly around the sheet of paper.
So I'm not going to think about this too much. This is really about just enjoying the process. So how would flying feel it? I think I will be spinning gliding, swirling. I'd feel really weightless. I'm going to get another colour now. Maybe a lighter blue.
Maybe I'd fly really fast and really slow.
Maybe I would swoop and soar while you are doing this, try to cover the entire sheet of paper.
So, here's my picture. How I would imagine it would look if my pencil, my crayon was flying around the page.
Your drawing might look completely different to mine because you might think that flying on a page looks different and that's completely fine.
This is about enjoying the process. Okay, now I'm going to flip my drawing over and I'm going to draw on the other side.
We are taking inspiration here in our drawing from Ildiko Kovacs and her painting in flight, which is an abstract representation of how she would feel to be in
flight. We've drawn flying on the page. This time we're going to draw the sensation, how we might imagine the sensation would feel to be in flight.
I'm imagining my hair streaming out behind me.
I am imagining my arms, my hands reaching forward like a superhero.
The breeze coursing down my body, down my back.
And again, I'm focusing on really trying to cover the whole sheet of paper.
Maybe I'm imagining my toes and a tickling feeling in between them and I can hear with my ears a whooshing sound. Okay, so I finished that drawing my representation of the feeling of being in flight, that sensation.
So we have two abstracts representations now of being in flight. One where we flew our pencil, our texter, our oil pastel over the page, and the other one, this sensation of being in flight. And now taking inspiration from Yvonne Koolmatrie and her biplane sculpture.
We are going to turn this 2D object into a 3D form very simply by folding it into a paper airplane.
So to do this, you Fold first length ways down the center. This is where the second piece of paper comes in.
If you are using oil pastels like I am, when you go to fold it, it'll smudge.
So I'm putting the second piece of paper on top so it doesn't, doesn't smudge my drawing while I'm creating that fold line.
Okay, so you've made that fold line. Then you unfold, you fold one corner down to meet in the middle.
Then the other corner, we repeat that step again. So you're going to fold this corner into the centre line again because we've got this double fold at the top here. It will means that the nose of the plane will be, be heavier and a better flyer, hopefully the same on the other side. Fold down the centre and, then you fold down one wing, flip it over and fold the other wing.
So here is my completed paper airplane because I did the drawing on both sides of the paper.
It means that you can see that drawing coming through on all sides of the sculptural object.
So that's why it's important you could, unfold and try folding it in the opposite direction to see how that changes the patterns.
You may have made your work of art with a friend or family member or maybe a group of people, and if you did, you could now challenge them all to a paper airplane throwing competition.
The winner is the person who's plane goes the furthest.
And if you do win your prize is the satisfaction of knowing that you are the best paper airplane maker. It's a lot of fun this activity.
I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks so much for joining me.