The elephant art club

I'm going to be running some after school art clubs at a local primary school from next month and I've just been to meet the teacher that will be mentoring me. She was such a lovely, enthusiastic lady and I thought how lucky the children must be to have someone so keen on working with artists and developing the children's creative abilities. I wish I felt the same about Kim's art education...

The art clubs are organised by KEAP (Kernow Education and Arts Partnership) and are a kind of experiment for the govt's extended schools plans (they'll have to be open from 8am - 6pm in the next couple of years). 12 artists have been selected for the training from all different areas of practice from fine art to puppet making and textile design. We'll each be spending 5 weeks in one school, and then 5 weeks in another; it's a great opportunity for me to work alongside teachers to learn a few 'crowd-control' techniques before I'm let loose on my own with a group of rampaging mini-beasts!

I'll be starting in mid February and had thought that for the first class I'd teach the children how to transfer an image onto paper using a grid (I was appalled to discover the number of adults that didn't know how to do this at adult education!). I'm going to get them to imagine that they are explorers and are the first people to see an animal that they choose - they'll have to draw it as accurately as possible for people 'back home' to see what it looks like (ie copy it from a picture using the grid). I was inspired by Rembrandt's wonderful drawing of an elephant that he made at a time when seeing an elephant in Europe was a bit like seeing snow on Christmas day... Anyway when I went into the teacher's classroom this afternoon, guess what I saw? A whole table of little grey elephants made from milk cartons! Serendipity.

The British Museum have a picture of Rembrandt's elephant on their website; for more information see their Rembrandt fact sheet.