Wednesday afternoon is art club at the local school.  I set up the club at the start of term and was surprised just how many children signed up, keen to explore their creativity, even after a busy day at school.  The energy in that room for our hour of art never ceases to amaze me.  Some of the children follow the ideas I put forward by the letter, others ask to do things a little differently and a few just play by their own rules, exploring their own ideas and building up their own personal style and visual vocabulary with, perhaps, a nod to the artist we are learning about on that day.

Today, I introduced the children to the art of Jean Dubuffet and, in particular, his collage works.  Having shown the children a few examples of Dubuffet’s art, I asked them to take their paintbrush for a walk and create a wandering black line all over their large sheet of white paper.  Then, as the paint dried, they built up colourful drawings and textures on smaller sheets of coloured paper.  These shapes and patterns were then cut up and stuck onto the black and white background which had, in some cases, been coloured in places or had further images added by hand.  Some truly wonderful abstract works emerged from this lesson and inspired my artwork this evening.  Tonight, I having a go at my own lesson… playing by my own rules.

So here, in a visual step by step, is what emerged and how I arrived at the finished work… my Day 2 creation for the 30 Day Challenge.