Hello Fearless Ideas community!
This week we wrapped up our final week of our Zoom-In on Stories summer sessions, and while we'll all miss seeing the student's faces, we had planned some special and fun activities this week to leave everyone with!
We opened the morning with our first activity: blind-line contour drawing! Students were asked to pick one person in the meeting, and try to draw them without ever looking down at their paper. Our intent behind this activity was to encourage students to embrace their mistakes, not worry too much about perfecting every detail, and just have fun! This was a great exercise to get everyone's creative juices flowing, and it was awesome to see how quickly students were able to guess the subject of each other's drawings - using clues such as glasses or curly hair to figure out who had been drawn. We loved seeing what each student came up with!
After we finished sharing everyone's drawing, our workshop leaders introduced the theme for this week: Mythic Imagination! We also introduced Camilla, a professional artist with a talent for drawing mythological creatures, and our special guest this week! Camilla gave us an amazing presentation on the key ideas for drawing mythological creatures. We learned about "creature math", which is using a combination of two animals to create a new, mythic creature. For example, horse + narwhal = unicorn! We also discussed what makes a mythological creature fantastical, such as making them "extra" (extra big, extra small, even extra limbs)!
Camilla then asked us to use what we learned with creature math to brainstorm different animal combinations. After we'd written up a solid list, students were encouraged to follow along or watch as Camilla got to work composing an awesome drawing of a mythological creature based on some of the traits that students had suggested. It was so fun seeing the result of everyone's ideas come to life!
Afterwards, students were given some creative time after our groupwork to individually work on their own new mythological creature. Before we left, we invited everyone to share their own creature or any other piece they had been working on, and give a short blurb about their character's lore or background. It was wonderful seeing all the imaginative and unique creations that everyone came up with! Students conjured up magical powers, portals, and more - but the highlight was when one student declared, "I've just scratched the surface!" And indeed, our activities today were just one wonderful start to all that can be explored in not only the world of mythology, but also of our students' limitless imaginations.
And with that, our workshop leaders ended with our takeaway for the day: Stories are everywhere, they live with us and surround us. We left students with this challenge:
We can't wait to see what students come up with :) A big thanks to all our students and families that have joined us at BFI for our Zoom-In on Stories programming this year, and helped us create such wonderful moments with each other - we hope to see you all again next year!
Until next time!
Written, edited, and published by Michelle Z.
Fearless Ideas Summer Intern
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