Creativity can (and should!) look really messy. It’s important to give your child the opportunity to make a mess in order to discover new possibilities, generate ideas and think through materials.
Creative art classes for children with Artistica Studio
Artistica Studio offers creative art classes for all children aged between 5 and 12 years old. They offer weekly after-school and Saturday art classes, and holiday workshops which are educational and inspirational.
Your children will create art projects through drawing, painting, and experimenting with mixed media. During the course your children will
- Receive step by step art instructions, guidance, and feedback.
- Be encouraged to create a variety of quality art pieces inspired in a diversity of subject matter.
- Practise painting application techniques, learn about colour mixing, texture, composition.
- Learn about artists and their styles, and art history fun-facts.
- Enjoy looking at artwork made by artists, craftspeople, architects, and designers.
- Develop and improve observational skills, focus, concentration, and self-esteem.
- Build confidence in their own ideas
Choose a Class
Budding Young Artists aged 5 – 8 : Tuesdays 4.15 – 5.15pm
The children will learn and practise lots of drawing based on images and still life, exploring different drawing and painting techniques. Artistica provides all the art materials required for the sessions. For more information and to book a place for your child, please click on the link
Budding Young Artists aged 5 – 8 : Thursdays 4 – 5pm
For more information and to book a place for your child, please click on this link
Creative Drawing & Painting aged 8 – 12 : Thursdays 5 – 6pm
The children will create art projects through drawing, painting, and experimenting with mixed media. They will continue to improve their drawing practice based on images and still life, exploring different drawing and painting techniques.For more information and to book a place for your child, please click on this link
Creative Art Studio aged 5 – 12 : Saturdays 10 – 11am
During these sessions the children will create multiple art projects. They will discover new artistic techniques through drawing, painting with
- acrylics
- watercolours
- pastels
- charcoals
- expressive collage
For more information and to book a place, please click on this link
Autumn Term Dates
- First class – Tuesday 12 September 2023
- Half term – week commencing 23 October – NO Classes
- Last class – Saturday 9 December 2023
Why not head over to the Artistica Studio website and find creative art classes for your children?
Materials
All materials are provided
£143 for the term.
Part term payments can be made if there is space.
To book – visit the Artistica Website
Where: OPEN Ealing Arts Centre W5 2TD
Dates: 12 Sep – 9 Dec Tuesday 4:15 pm Fees: £143 for the term
Carla Tebbutt
Carla’s two big passions in life are art and children.
She is based in Ealing and has taught art to children for over 7 years, delivering a unique balance of artistic technique while they discover the joy and freedom of their self-expression, allowing the extraordinary ways they experience the world to merge in their artwork.
Carla has a degree in Developmental Psychology and in Art Therapy for Children and has worked with children aged 18 months to 16 years old, both at school and privately.
Her work reflects the importance of being in the moment, feeling, experimenting, and expressing a story, her story.
At times she moves from the richly saturated colours of acrylic paints and inks to a more toned-down palette of pastels or the translucent and vibrant watercolours.
Painting is magic.
Some of her art work can be seen here
How to set up a kids studio
First, you need to set up a space or a “kids studio”. Ideally, this is a place where your child can make and leave work in progress.
Artists need time to mull over ideas. If they have to pack up their work at the end of each session, it disrupts the creative process. Artists like to make, take a break, think and go back to their work in spurts. Spurts can be five minutes or five hours.
Not everyone has a separate backyard studio in their home. So your studio could be the dining table or a corner of the lounge room. You can always cover the studio with a tablecloth to signify it is “closed” during dinner or for other activities.
Another excellent option is an easel. Standing at an easel to paint and draw helps the artist see their work better, as it allows them to stand back and look at the proportions of what they are doing.
Kids are also happy to make on the floor! A simple mat can help designate a studio space. The important thing is your child can come and go as the urge takes them.
And you don’t need special lights. Natural light is best as it doesn’t distort the colours and forms you are working with.
How can you encourage them to start?
Under the Reggio Emilio teaching philosophy, the environment around a child plays a central role in the process of making learning meaningful.
One way to encourage your child to begin creating is to place freshly sharpened pencils in a jar (not a box that needs opening) on the table with some paper and a provocation. This could be some shells or anything you know your child might find curious. This becomes an offering to “come and draw here”.
I also love Lyra’s stubby fat graphite sticks. These are good for all ages (from one and up) because they are sturdy and easily gripped. They also change when you add water, the graphite turns to paint – changing the drawing into a painting!
Good quality pencils will need to be sharpened less, break less when they are dropped and will last a very long time. You can also replace individual pencils, so in the long run it is more economical.
Paper
Good quality paper also makes a difference. The feeling of a pencil dragging across a rough or smooth surface promotes a sensory feeling that you do not get from inferior quality materials.
I like to use heavy watercolour paper. Look for paper thickness (200 to 300gsm) and feel the texture. You are looking for a nice surface (touch lots of paper and you will begin to know what a nice surface feels like). Canson make good water colour pads and you can find something similar at most art shops.
But sometimes all you need is a packet of A3 copy paper or a roll of butchers paper (which you can get from IKEA or Officeworks).
As influential professor of art education Viktor Lowenfeld noted, children under four are in the “scribbling” phase of their artistic development. So, young children will burn through paper.
Paint
IKEA make great acrylic and watercolour paints and the colours are vibrant.
I particularly like to use watercolours because they are like magic. They have a beautiful effect as they wash together, and they don’t dry up into blobs of plastic and destroy brushes (if you don’t clean them straight away). It’s easier to come and go from your work without the palaver of “getting the paints out”.
When watercolours dry up, you just “wake them up from their sleep” with water.
Brushes
Use soft bristle brushes for water colour and firm bristle brushes for acrylic paint.
Try to provide an assortment of sizes, of short and long handles and shapes such as round and flat. This will help your young artist explore a range of different marks.
You can get brushes from art stores but also Officeworks and IKEA. Examine the bristles closely: long soft floppy bristles or hard plastic ones are terrible to use and take the fun out painting.
Use recycled materials where possible
Art materials don’t have to cost the earth and you can be sustainable. Save magazines, newspapers, catalogues, flyers and cardboard boxes as they provide endless open-ended opportunities for making.
Things to say and NOT to say
As adults we tend to have decided what we can and can’t do. But do not say things to your child such as, “I can’t draw” or “I’m no good at art”.
Role model a positive can-do attitude and show your child that you can try anything (and it doesn’t matter whether you are “good” or not).
Try the ‘Exquisite Corpse’ drawing game.
I like to give my students practical skills they can apply to open-ended activities. That is, there is no prescribed outcome. This is important to keep in mind. If you set your child up with a certain activity but they do something completely different – this is not wrong or bad.
It seems counterintuitive, but avoid saying things such as, “that’s beautiful” or “that’s pretty”. Art isn’t just about making beautiful things it’s also about expressing yourself or trying to make sense of the world. It is a process as much as a product. So, don’t get hung up on the final art work.
So, instead of saying, “Oh that’s a great drawing of a giraffe”, ask them, “what were you thinking about when you made this?”
Keep in mind, there’s also a good chance it’s not even a giraffe! Very young children can change what they are drawing along the way. They might start out drawing their family but end up drawing something completely different. And when you show them the drawing after a week they might have a completely different explanation for the artwork.
So, don’t “correct” your child if they colour outside of the lines or draw something you can’t immediately understand. By the same token, never finish your child’s work for them.
