The Best of 2012

This last year has been an exceptional one for the Youth Program. There have been kid art exhibitions, Fall Festivals, giant crayons, murals, and so much art making it almost boggles the mind. To mark yet another great year in the history of our Youth Program, we have created an album of sorts to look back on all that our instructors and students have accomplished over the last 12 months. Here’s a look at a few moments from the past year that we love.

Pretty great, yeah! If you would like to see more moments from 2012, visit our Best of 2012 set on our flickr site! Well… the last years has been super… but I have a feeling 2013 will be even better!

Youth Program Fall Festival - This Saturday!

Woohoo! It’s almost here! Our Youth Program Fall Festival is this Saturday, the 17th, and we couldn’t be more excited! We hosted something similar to this last March in celebration of our Portland Perspectives Exhibition, and we hope to make these types of events a regular thing.

DATE: Saturday, November 17th, 2012
TIME: 11:30am – 1:30pm
LOCATION: PNCA Commons,
1241 NW Johnson St.

Remember! This is a free event that you can share with your friends and family. Enjoy refreshments and a complimentary catered lunch generously provided by Noodles & Company. Plus you can participate in so many fun activities this Saturday, including:

Making larger than life drawings!
Hand crafting your own holiday cards and stickers!
Drawing pictures with your family!
Screen Printing a t-shirt!
Face Painting!

Again, we hope you choose to join us for this fun, family friendly event. It is going to be fantastic! See you there!

Web Design Tools Class

This week wraps up our Fall quarter’s weekly classes. We have had a great term which included introducing new digital classes like Marketing: Digital Strategies and web design workshops with David Lowe-Rogstad. This is the third year of Web Design Tools which explores various content management systems, strategies for designing a website and examines the process for determining best-practice web solutions. I wanted to share some of the work from Web Design Tools, which is very impressive.

• Shark and Olive
• Backwood Company
• Supply & Work
• Pickle and Schmoo

Did you know…

Children draw a certain way at a certain age for a reason. It’s true. The stages of how a child’s drawing skills develop as they grow older is really interesting. Several great minds over the years have done research on this sort of thing; i.e. people like Viktor Lowenfeld and Betty Edwards. Our Program educators look to these models quite a bit in order to structure projects for our students. This is also one of the first things we teach Program Interns when they participate in our Youth Program Teaching Internship. Here are two of the earlier stages via Viktor Lowenfeld for you (using artwork from PNCA’s Youth Program, of course).

The Preschematic Stage (ages 3 – 4): Children consciously attempt to draw the human form. Children also start incorporating symbols and telling stories with their drawings.

The Schematic Stage (Age 6): Children figure out a definite way of portraying an object/person/animal/etc. This ‘schema’ represents the child’s knowledge of the subject. During this stage children also start to understand there is definite order to spacial relationships.

Pretty cool, right! (I’m kinda a geek about this stuff.) Anyway, we’ll be sharing interesting art education theory via this blog from time to time so that you can better understand the roots of our curriculum! See if you can spot the Preschematic and Schematic stages in some of our most recent Flickr uploads.

Youth Program Fall Festival

To honor our students and celebrate their achievement this term the PNCA Youth Program will be hosting a Fall Festival! What is a Fall Festival? A party; complete with art, food, and good vibes. Here are some details for you:

DATE: Saturday, November 17th, 2012
TIME: 11:30am – 1:30pm
LOCATION: PNCA Commons,
1241 NW Johnson St.

Join us as we conclude our Fall Term with a bang! Just in time for the start of the winter holiday season, our Fall Festival provides a variety of free art-based activities for children and families. Enjoy refreshments and a free catered lunch generously provided by Noodles & Company. There will be a variety of free activities, including:

Making larger than life drawings!
Hand crafting your own holiday cards and stickers!
Drawing pictures with your family!
Screen Printing a t-shirt!
Face Painting!

This is sure to be great fun for the whole family! If you would like to RSVP via Facebook you can do so by visiting our events page. Please share this super opportunity with your friends and family! We hope to see you and your children there!

The Art of Godzilla

This week our Comics + Zines class made some head way on their Godzilla drawings! So far, the artwork is turning our quite awesome. Here are a few of the finished pieces.

Pretty nice, right! It is cool to see what aspects students choose to focus on, ie Godzilla’s atomic breath, Godzilla vs. ‘Insert Monster Here’, Godzilla smashing stuff. To help the ideation process along students watched clips of Godzilla on YouTube, including a good portion of the Godzilla vs. Mothra film. It was great seeing young students excited by the theme, and intrigued by old school monster movie effects. If you would like to see more images of the great and powerful Godzilla, check out our Flickr Site.

In the Middle

We’ve hit the mid-point of our Fall Term. There are so many awesome things going on in our classes we couldn’t possibly share them all in one blog post. However, there are a few images we can share that will give you a sense of how many awesome things our students are working on right now.

Work we hope to show you in the coming weeks? … Prints by the MiniMasters, Godzilla panels from our Comics + Zines class, some of the super detailed paintings from our Observational Painting class. Click the jump to visit our flickr site. —>

Sketchbooks!

We had a chance to peek in to some of our Mixed Media student’s sketchbooks this week! Very cool! Some sketchbook work is ideation for a project and then other drawings are based in student interest, i.e. what they typically draw in their free time. Totally diggin the lean-back swag of the giraffe and the stoic profile of the mouse on the bottom image. You can see more sketchbook captures from our awesome students by visiting our Sketchbook Club set on Flickr.

PS… Pretty sure there is some zombie action in that first image.

Winter Classes

Winter classes are open for registration! We are getting an early start this winter with weekend workshops in December including Trend Forecasting, Illustration Marketplace and Content Strategy for the Web. With classes to expand your creative and professional skills, we have a wide range of classes in many disciplines, from Welding to Web Design and Beginning Painting to Printmaking. Continuing Education hopes you can join us and start the New Year creating.

Thanks!

While going through our Flickr Site this morning to determine what today’s blog post would be about, I was struck by how many stellar young artists our Program has had the privilege to work with over the last few years. I know that I speak for our instructors when I relay how super lucky we feel… getting the chance to work with your children… to teach them about art. We are continually moved by their genuine curiosity, engaging intellect, and their clear vision of the world around them. They are very cool people. Very cool, indeed. Thanks for the opportunity!