RHI After School Update: Class 4 of 10

Our latest session of RHI After School classes is in full swing. With the help of Kentler Teaching Artist Meghan Keane and RHI tutors, Ricky and Destiny, students have been focusing on their goal for this session: "get better at drawing" but specifically "learn to draw people"!

This week students and advisers did musical chairs observational drawing. Students looked across the desk at their neighbor, observing specific facial features, and practiced drawing different parts on cardboard pieces. They switched seats every two minutes in time to music, listening to a local string quartet's new Phillip Glass recording (Brooklyn Rider).

At the end, look what sort of playful, constructed, triangular portraits they created:



RHI middle school group hard at work.


Left: a collaborative portrait playing with textured, perforated cardboard.


Left: trying out what happens when a nose goes across multiple pieces. Right: using dark shapes to create contrast between the neck and the background.

March School Programs : with Arezoo Moseni

K.I.D.S. Art Ed has welcomed local Red Hook students from P.S. 15, P.S. 676, and BNS to the gallery this month.
We have been looking at work by artists Beverly Ress and Arezoo Moseni. The question that we're focusing on this session is: How can a drawing grow? Using each artist's work as a starting point, students have begun exploring different ways drawings can grow (or expand) and different ways to make a drawing.


This blog post will highlight the activity we do with Arezoo Moseni's work. Our next blog post will feature the activity we are doing with Beverly Ress' work.


Led by teaching artist Meghan Keane, students first spend time looking at one of Moseni's works on paper in which indigo, the dye used to color jeans, is her medium. 

Changes #24. Moseni

Students noticed she uses lots of different colored blues and purples, that there are many triangles and diamond-like shapes that come in a variety of sizes, and many students notice that it looks like a portal or a worm hole or something caving in toward the center. It has alternately reminded students of a star, a crystal, water, and...a mountain (because of the layered curves)!

After spending some time discussing the work students worked individually with laminated triangles, of many different colors and sizes, to create a drawing on the floor.  Students were asked to imagine that the large brown floor was their "piece of paper" and the colorful triangles were their "crayons," their drawing material.

Students explored what happens when you place ONLY the sides together 

and then ONLY the points:

create a HOLE in the middle of your drawing, 

or what happens when you work with a partner to create a drawing of something they can find in the city.


These are some of the images of what we've come up with!

Our next post will feature student work from their explorations with the work of Beverly Ress. 

Stay tuned!