Drawing Day
I wanted to share some photos from last Sunday of one of my favorite events, Drawing Day in The Art Studio. The Carle devotes one Sunday every spring to scribbles, doodles, designs, paintings, cartoons, traces and sketches. For Drawing Day this year we brought out some of our most popular drawing tools and divided the room into six different stations for visitors to work with the materials in an independent, open-ended way. Thanks to a generous donation from the paper company Canson, Inc., each visitor received a free sketchpad to use at the different stations and to continue their drawing discoveries at home. Thank you Canson!
At the “Make Your Mark” station visitors scribbled and rubbed different textured rubbing plates onto their papers with colorful crayons. Learn how to create your own textured rubbing plates using paper and glue.
At the “Free Draw” station some experimented with drawing without looking (or contour drawing) by wearing our funky “blindfold” sunglasses. Pop out the lenses, paint them with a few coats of black acrylic or gesso, let them dry, and pop them back in place and you’ve got a blindfold! These are a great alternative to cloth blindfolds for a classroom or party.
When you can’t see what your hand is doing, what you think you are drawing is often quite different from what you actually draw! It’s a fun challenge, try it the next time you’re drawing at home.
Here’s a photo of visitors making 3D wire “drawing” sculptures.
The thumbprint cartoon station and the watercolor station were the most popular tables of the day and visitors filled their new sketchpads with brightly colored doodles, marks and cartoons.
Also on Sunday, author and illustrator Durga Bernhard shared a few of her books at a special storytime in the Reading Library.
Afterwards, Durga joined us in The Studio to meet with visitors and give them a a chance to see her drawing process. Durga and her friend came up with a delightful caption to the illustration she hung up on our back wall. She drew “A long-tailed firebird who stole a fish from the octopus.” Stop by The Studio this weekend to see Durga’s beautiful drawing. Thank you for joining us Durga!
