Day 02

Workshop: Designing Life (second day)
Date: 13 December 2008
Time: 2-6pm
Participants: Chan Sze Qi, Lai Ming Jun, Yap Kah Man
Details: Designing Life is a workshop to educate the participants on the importance of art and design through any applications. Here, the participants will be asked to paint the gate in front of the nursery and think about eye-catching visuals, support with creative ideas.

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As mentioned earlier, pattern was the main topic for today. Managed to stuff the lesson with some traditional patterns like pucuk rebung, sulur bayung and awan larat. Those participants were doing good, the purpose is to give them a very fundamental introduction rather than having them memorizing an abundance of texts academically.

Later we have an exercise where the participants would need to work out together - as a group - to create/generate black and white patterns with some techniques which I taught them at the beginning of the day. This exercise inclined towards the aesthetics (of surface) hence less cerebral.

Apparatus.

First trial: Hm...poor consistency of space. Failed.

Being less cerebral of course does not suggest a simple task, their first trial was a mess, second one looks more organized (can be better though). Somebody even spilt the ink all over the table - I kept reminding them to be careful but accident like this wasn't rare.

They were so excited with creating chops from the cucumber and ignored all the other methods taught.

A rather auspicious day to spill ink.

...and now presenting you the prepetrator: Mr Lai. :D

Cool stuff from William Morris of the Pre-Raphaelites era.

More patterns.

This was not from the workshop but I would like to show this here, great play of shapes and patterns. A drawing by the 8 year-old Priscilla Loh.

Being a nanny.

Chopping all the way...

Yup, it's him again!

The final piece was alright. But I do wish if they can do more and create a hierarchy (having a focus point and 'isen' - a batik term of 'filler') within the patterns even, most likely to be better after all the experiments and some light scoffs. (Boleh?)

After the pattern workshop, conductor Phoon Shiau Tyng guided them through their brain-storming session on gate-painting. Their finalized idea is quite provocative, lucid; cliches of the kids like animals and lots of colours. The result also heavily dependent on their execution which will start on the up-coming Monday (15 December). What I visualized was something kaleidoscopic, motley, vibrant.

The process will be documented, photos will be uploaded daily, so do visit this blog often to know exactly what are they up to.

Lastly, all the best to Sze Qi, Ming Jun and Kah Man on Monday.