Camp Friendship Art Program
Schedule of Activities
Week 1 - Andy Goldsworthy: Art in Nature
Go to Prospect Park to create outdoor sculptures using natural objects that were collected, such as fallen leaves, sticks, stones and seeds. Created items will be photographed. Andy Goldsworthy is our inspiration.
Week 2– Found + Made: Adorning Nature
Return to Prospect Park to continue using natural objects. Introduce human-made materials such as wire, beads, buttons, yarn, and string to transform their found objects. Unlike Week 1's temporary sculptures, these small works can be brought home.
Week 3 – Botanical Hammer Prints + Ink
Students will release the natural pigments of fresh leaves, flowers, grasses, and ferns as they learn to press them onto paper. They will accentuate the design using fine-tip black ink pens to observe and respond to the botanical structures.
Week 4 – Botanical Printmaking + Mixed Media
Building off week 3, students create botanical impressions but this time they learn to incorporate other media to create an entirely new item image.
Week 5 – Cyanotypes: Painting With Sunlight
Students gather leaves, grasses, flowers, feathers, seed pods, and other interesting materials and arrange them on cyanotype paper. Students will experiment with overlapping, transparency, negative space, and composition before exposing the work to sunlight, which will result in a blue and white image.
Week 6 – Shapes From Nature: Cut-Paper Collage
Students first create their own richly colored papers using oil pastels, paint sticks, watercolor, markers, or combinations of materials. These drawings then become raw material. Cut, tear, layer, and rearrange the papers into simplified organic forms inspired by branches, leaves, flowers, stones, seeds, and other shapes encountered during previous weeks.
Week 7 – Making Color From Nature
Using safe natural materials such as berries, red cabbage, beets, onion skins, turmeric, and greens, students experiment with creating their own inks.
Week 8 – Make Your Own Paintbrushes
Students make their own brushes using natural, textured materials. Once constructed, students test their brushes and begin discovering the very different marks each one produces.
Week 9 – Mark-Making Laboratory
Working on large sheets or rolls of paper, students explore natural inks alongside washable paint or liquid watercolor using their hand-made brushes from week 8.
Week 10 – Painting Without Paintbrushes
Students continue to experiment with art strokes by using unexpected items.
Week 11– Nature Alchemy: Accordion Artist Books
Students will work with an accordion artist book to record their work, observations, lessons and art from previous weeks. When unfolded completely, the individual pages become one continuous visual landscape.
Week 12– Our Temporary Museum
Activity: Return to Andy Goldsworthy and the idea that opened the course: art doesn't have to last forever to matter.