1: Build your 'Character' and their room.

June 2, 2018

Workshop 1, Day 1

Order, Chaos!

The first workshop of a potential 14, was the most nerve-wracking until it started.

I landed in Sri Lanka at 3.30am on the 29th of May and planned to begin the Workshops on Saturday, June 2. This left me three days to recover from jet-lag, visit the children’s center, buy materials and convince students to come there in the first place! This was the first ‘workshop’ and was to last three hours. I hoped that if I provided them with a mid-workshop snack, they would stay on with the same energy. A week before, while I was in New York - I spoke with the children’s center coordinators - Ms. Pramila and Ms. Neranjala - as well as Sahani, the current art class teacher. I emailed a trilingual a poster to them to distribute amongst the students. I also asked them to convince the students verbally about the workshop telling them ‘we are going to do more projects like the junk robot’. I suggested that 30 kids per workshop were fine, as that was what I suggested in the Goodman Grant proposal.

To my surprise, 26 students turned up on Saturday, and 29 on Sunday. The regular art class only accommodated 13 students, as there was only one available volunteer teacher. I was happy to know that if offered, 30 kids would actually turn up. 

This was a cheap poster - I know that the center has a photocopy machine, so asked the coordinators of the children’s center to print this on colored A4 papers to give it some pop!

Introducing myself

The workshop began as planned. At the start of the workshop (1pm) I re-introduced myself as there was only 5 or 6 students who were familiar to me from my earlier classes 3 years ago. I told them that I went to university to study how to make ‘house designs’ (roughly translated) and that I was going to teach a few classes based on what I’ve been learning too. This new batch of students didn’t have as much of a diverse age range as my previous class- which was an unexpected surprise to me. I was somehow relying on a balanced range of older and younger kids to encourage more complex projects. However most of the kids were from grade 2 -4 (which is between 6-8 years old) making my new audience significantly younger. There were also around 5 15-17 year olds, which made it an added challenge. This age range wouldn’t affect this weekend’s workshops, but I made a mental note to re-work the coming workshops to fit this age range.

How to you draw to scale?

I handed out several pages with little line drawings of houses, tall buildings, vehicles, lampposts and trees printed on them. I asked the kids to draw a stick figure in it at random and then showed them at class and asked if ‘that person can fit through the door’ - denoting scale. Some kids were initially afraid to draw on it for fear of being wrong. Eventually, all sorts of stick figures appeared on the pages - some to scale, some not. Afterward (maybe around 10 mins later) I showed several pages individually to the class and asked everyone what they thought, by asking, 

Illustration by Irushi Tennekoon

Do you think this person can fit through the door? 

What about this one?

Or this? 

Can he fit into this tuk-tuk (Bajaj Three wheeled taxi)? 

Maybe if he sits down he can fit in?

All-in all, a good, quick exercise that helped the kids understand the next project. 

Making a scale figure

The next project was to build a scale figure. The materials I provided were thin, colorful wire, wool, cloth, colored paper and Popsicle stick sized sticks, glue and tape - another thing I could have used would have been toothpicks - a thinner material that would have enabled a smaller scale figure.

Some little scale figures, also known as ‘characters’

Making the room for your Scale Figure

The next task (which I had already introduced to the kids alongside the scale figure exercise)- was to build a ‘room’ for this person to be in. I provided them with mostly 2D materials, giving them the challenge to create something 2D out of it. I also challenged then to measure the scale figure so that the ‘stick figure can fit through the door’

Initially, a majority of the kids found it frustrating and struggled to get started. My guess is they probably wondered, ‘why aren’t we drawing on paper?’ and were confused when asked to suddenly deal with three dimensions. I got of questions like ‘how do I do this?’ However when they did finally get working on the project, they kept going till they had something they wanted to show-off to the instructors. Instead of a ‘room’ their projects turned out to be little houses - with little roofs, fences and gardens - focusing more on the exterior condition than the interior.

The Character’s ‘room’ ended up looking like little houses

What I wish I could change

In a sense, this exercise was a success - as they gained confidence in three dimensional ‘making’, which was the underlying concept of the class. Given the age of the kids, I would have perhaps benefited from providing them with a little framework - something like a shoe-box to build the room in. 

The ‘Big Project’  had a second part, which was to build another room for the scale figure, but to imagine that he/she lived in space. Since our time was up, we kept that for the next day. 

This is what the (somewhat chaotic) classroom looked like on the first day!

He was very determined to keep his project standing up!