Discover the Thrill of Creating Collaborative Art Work!

Collaborative art work is awesome. Creating a painting with a group of people brings you together with a group of people in a shared creative experience. You grow in confidence as you are painting companionably with others, moving from place to place, interacting with what each other are doing, layering and overlapping. Your skills and confidence is build without comparison anxiety and performance pressure that we all feel painting our own individual artwork.

Let’s have a look at three collaborative art works from my own collection of social art projects:

Find Your Confidence in Creating the Layers of a Vibrant School Mural!

This collaborative art work: “Find Your Confidence”, was the ‘mobile mural’ part of a public mural in their school, Aberfoyle Park High School in South Australia, which takes the mural inside on a canvas, it was painted alongside the large wall mural. This collaborative art work was created in a freeform style – in a guided spontaneous form, with the girls directed to start painting circles, spirals and dots of different sizes and colours, then adding to the elements of each other, adding layers of patterns and marks, building on the visual complexity over several weeks.

Reflection:

This collaborative art work was created by a group of teenage girls. They painted out in public, building their confidence, realising they can do MORE than they may have thought possible – that people walking past watching them paint could be ‘zoned out’, and in fact those people were highly complimentary about what they were creating!

Aspire to Success by Using the ‘Success Strategies’ of Collaborative Art Projects.

This collaborative art work “Aspire to Success” was created by 120 junior primary students over three sessions and relates to the school logo of IQRA College in South Australia. The kids had a great time in several rotating groups, each level of kids doing a different stage – the reception kids did ‘Messy Playing’ with sponging, stencilling and scraping, the grade 1’s did ‘Exploring’ with medium and small brushes, and the grade 2’s did ‘Bling!’ with paint pens, stickers and glitter glue. SO many kids! This is a detail from 2 collaborative art projects created over three sessions.

Reflection:

This is one of two large canvases – needed with this many children, that’s for sure! The teachers told me of some children did more in this novel situation than they would in the regular classroom – it’s the novelty and the ‘group painting’ that enables shy children to be more adventurous as they can in some ways hide as they create with each other – moving around and being free to explore. They build their creative confidence and can then feel more able to create in their individual art.

In this collaborative artwork, created in only one session, we used brushwork, stamping, layering and overlapping. It has a mixed colour palette. These days I would have a coloured background (the underpainting) and then layer cool then warm colours. Really, a background that is not stark white is a game changer! There’s many ways of doing it – one colour, an ombre, using spray paint, using blotches of colours – all impact the final artwork, and most of all – an underpainting frees people to begin! That white canvas is very much a visual block.

Reflection:

This was the first collaborative art work I did with a group of fellow parent carers in our “Parents Time Out” activity for mums with children with special educational needs. This is when I first felt the thrill of collaborative art, and led to the hundreds of artworks created with over two thousand people so far.

3 Collaborative Art Works – Conclusion:

These three collaborative art works show how a variety of groups of people – young children, teenagers and adults enjoy creating together, and in doing so paint truly unique artworks developed from the dynamics of their group – whether that be ten ladies or 120 little kids just starting school. They have fun!

Discover how to create collaborative art works like these – Join my Inner Circle email list so I can give you “Starting Your First Social Art Project at Home”, my free 7 page step by step guide making it effortless for you to paint a unique artwork using my three fun stages with a group of people in your life.

– Charndra, Your Inclusive Social Art Guide.

Let’s Chat:  

I love spirals. Circles turn into spirals. Big, small, open or tight spirals look great on an artwork – they are my favourite shape.

What’s your favourite shape?