Things can change on a dime.

I'm thinking of changing the name of the class to improv drawing class. Sometimes I let the Club House Artists guide the direction of the class by a group brainstorm. I might start the idea by naming an object that we could draw and then ask for a story. As the Club House Artists start mentioning things they like, somehow I get these crazy ideas for drawings and we go with it. Example, today, I had in mind we were going to draw the most beautiful snow globe for our Mothers for Mother's Day. Half way through the drawing while drawing the base of our snow globe I looked at our drawing and said it looks like a gumball machine. Then one of the Club House Artists mentioned something else about gumball machines and I thought it would be cool to put little sayings on each gumball for Mom. So we turned our snow globe into a gumball machine. One artist was still wondering how we went from snow globe to gumball machine and I just smiled and said,"We all came up with the idea together, right?"  (Really the truth is my brain won't stop thinking so if I get off track, sometimes I just keep going that direction. Snow globe. Gumball machine. . .same thing right?)

Here are a couple of the Club House Artists Race Car Dinosaurs. They didn't finish them in class and took them home.

Ideas on the fly!

The girls have been real troopers. They fought through drawing cubes and finally had decent ones by the end of class. First, we made presents to celebrate school. I asked the girls for homework to draw a page full of presents. To imagine how many presents they wanted Santa to bring them. Then I asked each girl how many presents did they want for Christmas. They all shouted, "ONE!" So either they are really good kids and/or really smart kids!

I'm finding that having preplanned drawing ideas is only sometimes needed. These kids come up with great ideas during class that we turn into the day's drawing. While talking about presents one mentioned that she accidentally found her Christmas present in the laundry room where her Uncle had been. She was looking for him and then accidentally saw her present. After she told that story one of the girl's exclaimed, "Your Uncle was in the laundry machine?!" That gave me the idea of showing them how to draw laundry machines using the cube they just learned to draw. They had a blast coming up with ideas of what to show in the washer window. One drew her sister!