Whole Staff Workshop 2014

Late last year, in preparation for the junior school Art Show, I ran the following staff workshop in Visual Art. The aim was for each planning/teaching/admin team to produce a painted canvas that could be hung in the upcoming Art Show. Through the specialist Visual Arts programme I had focused on the element of Line with my students, during the year and wished to extend on this learning with their teachers. 

During the preliminary meeting, each team was asked to do a google images search using the following terms:
doodles, zendoodles, zentangles.
This helped them become familiar with this current trend in the art world.
Teachers were then asked to brain storm the significant events in their teaching year to date, unique to their teams. Each member of the team selected some of these ideas and added them to the original search terms, e.g zendoodle + fish or zendoodle + butterflies

Teachers were encouraged to do observational drawings of their favourite images found, using paper and pencil.

Our wonderful music and drama specialist teachers working together on their team's piece. As you can tell they were living and breathing the school production of Seussical at the time. Our principal was responsible for the drawings on this canvas.

After some time, the teams members were encouraged to share what they had individually created and then consider how to combine or organise some element from each member's work, into a team design.  the finalised design was sketched onto a square canvas and penned in with a permanent marker.

The colour was added later by the teams, with a great product called Lyra Aquacolor Pastel. The design can be coloured in allowing for more control, then water painted to fill the spaces. Bright, vivid paintings were the result of this workshop. The students and parents loved this display  at the show.