Saturday, April 7, 2012 at 8:33AM Our Exquisite City
Recently I volunteered to run an art project for my daughter's Kindergarten class as part of a fund-raising event where the piece will be auctioned. What an experience! Over the course of two in class visits, a take home exercise and additional in class exercise we explored surrealism and urbanism and collaboration. The 27 students in the Coonley Options Kindergarten class used "Exquisite Corpse" techniques to illustrate the city of their wildest imagination.
"Our Exquisite City" close-up
To begin I gave them a presentation on the Surrealists and the history of their games, notably the “cadavre exquis” or "Exquisite Corpse" group drawing excercise. Then we looked at the city from the sky via google in a way Charles and Ray would love, followed by a practice round of corpse making at each table. The afternoon's activities laid the foundation for the take home.
Starting with the street grid of an interesting section of San Francisco , I generated vector lines, and a 7x4 grid to subtract out all but 1/4" margins from the street lines. This generated the point-of-departure for the children to use to draw their section of the city, while maintaining at least a directive sense of continuity and connectivity. Each square a masterpiece unto itself, the 27 student drawings and the collection of signatures form a beautiful rendition of the city of their dreams.
"Our Exquisite City" pencil drawing by student
Upon completion of the pencil drawings I scanned each drawing and converted the pencil lines to vector art. On a second visit to the classroom I demonstrated to the students how to use a digital painting program to paint the vectorized version of their pencil drawings. As you might imagine an edeavor of this craziness magnitude was a bit optimistic. Without mice on the laptops it was a bit challenging. Many were succesful ... unfortunately many were not. To remedy the painting learning curve, we colored the vector drawings with a reduced color palatte of markers.
"Our Exquisite City" colored drawing by student
The result was imho wildly succesful. The variety of the sections, changes from plan to elevation, and much more are really enjoyable. After combining the original vectorized art, over the top of a slightly desaturated version of the colored drawings, each student drawing was printed on pre-stretched 6"x6" canvas. The finished piece being a grid of 28 canvases with one being used for signatures.
"Our Exquisite City" illustrations together
"Our Exquisite City Combined"