One of the highlights of this year’s Summer’s Cool program–studio classes for kids ages 3-14, was the D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself) Director class. Considering that even short films can easily take months to shoot, edit, and produce, it was impressive to see 14 young filmmakers complete a video project in a mere 15 hours. Below are two of my favorites:

To Be Named Shortly: A Documentary

by Emma and Hannah

Vanished

by Zoe and Sierra

Recreate Yourself:

An activity to build on your visit to the Picasso and American Art exhibition

A great way to wind up a family visit to the Walker is to reflect on the artists you saw by making some masterpieces of your own. The Picasso and American Art exhibit shows a wide variety of portraits by both Picasso and many American artists, like Roy Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollock and Max Weber to name a few. What you may notice is the way that these artists divide, rebuild, and fragment the figures in their portraits.

During a Summer’s Cool class called Paint like Picasso students learned to emulate Picasso by creating several self portraits and then cutting them apart and reassembling the pieces to create a new work of art. Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Grab a mirror and make faces (lots of faces); the more variety in the faces the more variety in your final work of art. After studying your face, make several (4-5) black outline (contour line) paintings of those faces you can make. Let them dry. (Black markers or crayons will work too if you can’t make a mess!)

Step 2: Add Color. Fill in the white space with creative colors. Think about Picasso’s palette; in his paintings people certainly weren’t limited to natural skin tones and realistic colors. Let them dry.

Step 3: Cut them up, yes, cut them up. These can be in various shapes and sizes, but it seems to work well to cut each face into 5 or 6 average size pieces.

Step 4: Put them back together. Use a larger piece of paper to reconnect your shapes in a new way and there you have it your very own Picasso inspired masterpiece!

Many thanks to artist Jennifer Nevitt for teaching the class and developing this fun project; to Ariane Smith our fabulous Family Programs intern, for assisting the class and writing up this post; and to Antonia Ukofia, yet another wonderful Family Programs intern, who made the images above.

Here are some example projects made by kids in the Paint Like Picasso class: