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.