I’m currently teaching a series of workshops through CWC called Picture Perfect: Exploring Creative Writing through the Lens of Art History.
I’ve delivered this program several times before, but it continues to evolve. This time around, I was given more weeks than usual to deliver workshop series, so I ended up adding some units. Despite this, I still feel like we are zooming through history and hardly doing anything justice.
For our first project, we explored the very first recorded art that we know of: cave paintings. After viewing images and videos of some of the famous sites from around the world, I introduced a project in which the students could create cave-painting style images on rocks. Afterwards, they were assigned to write a short story about a character who is the first member of a society to paint on a cave wall.
Doing the activity helped them put their minds in the right framework. One of the interesting things about this course has been trying to put everything into context for the young students. For example, they simply weren’t aware that prehistoric and ancient artists (not to mention Medieval ones) had a limited color palette available to them.
Here are some photos of our project in progress . . .
Between the Cracks of Here and There 