Artist’s Workshop at Bighorn Canyon

As featured on the site New England College Edlinks, this Thursday will be the first class of the artists’ workshop at Bighorn Canyon. We will start promptly at 7 pm, but class will be open to all until then or until the seats fill up. In the event that we overbook, we will do our best to accommodate you, although you should do your best to get there on time to secure a good seat. Over the course of the next 12 weeks, we will be working on a variety of different art topics, going over the history as well as getting to practice ourselves. The classes will usually consist of an hour or so of lecture about the topic of the week followed by an hour or so of practice time and a class review where we can critique each other’s work and focus on areas to grow. Over the next 12 weeks, here are a few of the topics that we will cover.

Sculpture

We will work primarily with clay in our class, although there are plenty of other forms of sculpture. Clay is the easiest in terms of molding for beginners. At the end of the class, our teacher will collect all of the works and take them to the kiln to be set for the next week, so that you have your piece of art to take home. With sculpture, people love the tactile approach to art and feel a bit more control with the shaping. You are also given a bit more leeway in terms of mistakes because you can massage out issues instead of erasing them entirely. Sculpture is a great entry point into other forms.

Photography

You might have thought that the artists’ creations must always come from your imagination and ability to recreate, but photography is an art in itself and the concepts in photography will help you get a varied view of what to put in the frame. When you think about it, photography is just a much easier version of framing an image than art, so you can work on some of the details like positioning and scale to help you bring those concepts back to your other work. You will also get an idea of lighting when you are capturing things through a lens.

Crafting

This is a class that a lot of people hate to miss because it can be a lot of fun and give you skills in the DIY game that you can take home to beautify your living space. The art of crafting is taking old things that you would not use anymore and turning them into something new. A lot of people think that means trash art, but consider a bucket that has a crack in the plastic. You might decide that it is time to get a new bucket for bucket purposes, but the old bucket can find new life as the pot for a plant or the shell for a lamp. We test your creativity in what feels like Chopped for home design.