SAS

Saturday Art School

As people may or may not know, I am a supporting technician and assistant teacher at Leeds College of Art's Saturday Art School. This group is for children aged 7 to 18 to try and encourage art as a hobby, free from the restrains of school. I am working under the 3D sculpture and mixed media group, however those sessions haven't been as popular and have yet to start running yet. So my first shift was actually working on the open day, where I organised, set up and ran animation workshops for three hours (without any help!). I initially planned on hiring out a rostrum and camera and a laptop with the Dragon Stop Motion software on it, but I ended up keeping it simple and made flip books. I also had a few animations playing in the background, along with bringing a few of my own favourite animation books I own from home (for the children to use as inspiration, and for the parents to read), I had a mirror for people to try and capture their own expressions, as well as loads of colouring and drawing materials. In some points of the day the animation table was the busiest section out of all of the workshops, which was difficult to control as some of the older children wanted one to one talks about their work and the different roles in animation, as well as seeing some of the work I have made; whereas the younger children just needed help with a stapler and general supervision along with explaining how to actually make the flip books. Overall I felt the workshop was successful, and many of the people that attended went away with a little more knowledge or even just a bit more inspiration than they came in with. I also had some lovely feedback from Laura and Sharon who run the Saturday Art School, with how impressed they were that I had everything under control from start to finish, and that every child got the same amount of praise and help. They also mentioned that in the future they are tempted to hold more animation classes, if not a dedicated group of them, where they will keep me in mind to run them! All in all it was a very successful morning!

Here are a few of the images I took (when I actually had time!) of a few of the children's work.