Painting With Stuffies

Everyone brings one stuffed animal from home. We roll paint straight onto its fur with a foam roller, lay it face-down on paper and press, hard, with both hands, standing on the paper if that’s what it takes. Peel it up and there is the animal, fur texture and all. Then again in another colour, overlapping, until the sheet is a crowd.

Collective Self-Portraits

One enormous board goes up, headed DRAW YOURSELF, pre-painted with a grid of blank oval faces in every skin tone we can mix. Each kid claims an oval and draws themselves into it with a paint marker, hair, glasses, freckles, the gap in the teeth. Then they claim another. By the end the board is a crowd, and no single face belongs to anyone in particular.

Object-ive Art

A bag of pound-shop plastic, balloon dogs, tiny animals, beads, whatever the party aisle is selling, gets washed, sorted by colour and glued into a box frame on a painted card ground. Six objects, evenly spaced, is a piece of art. Forty objects in a heap is a mess. Deciding which is which, out loud, is the entire session.

Colourful Geometry

Everyone gets a real stretched canvas, the first proper one of the series, and no brushes. Colour goes on in soft-edged rectangles pushed around with old gift cards and bits of card, one block at a time, letting them run over each other where they meet. No subject, no drawing, nothing representational. Just squares of colour deciding who sits next to whom.

Pour It On A Basketball

A plain white basketball on an upturned cup, and squeeze bottles of thinned acrylic poured straight over the top. Gravity does the rest, colours run down the curve, meet, marble, and stop in ribbons over the black seam lines. Zero skill, total spectacle, and every kid’s ball comes out different. The object matters here: it is not a picture of a thing, it is a real basketball, which is why this one gets talked about for weeks. It sits on a plinth at the show and goes home afterwards, if the artist has not sold it.

Hands And Feet Dirty

Shoes off, one big canvas on the floor, black paint rolled onto the soles, and everybody walks across it. Hands too. It takes twenty minutes and produces the single best object of the whole series, a graphic black-and-white piece that looks deliberate and is really just eight kids and a wet canvas. Frame it in cheap pine and it hangs anywhere.

Sticky Dots

Paint one corner of the room white, a table, two chairs, some boxes, a roll of paper on the floor, and hand out rolls of coloured dot stickers. No paint, no glue, no drying time, and nothing to be good at. Over ninety minutes the white disappears under thousands of dots and the room itself becomes the artwork. Kids who never finish anything will not stop.

Stamping Away

Half art, half scavenger hunt. Each kid gets a clipboard, a bingo card of things to find, wood grain, a grid, a circle, a letter, a manufacturer’s name, something round, and a soft block they press onto a surface to lift its texture, then stamp onto the sheet. They hunt in pairs through the building and come back with a page of grey rubbings that reads like a map of the place.

Paper Moons

Every kid gets a plain white paper lantern and covers it in cut tissue, stars, flowers, a crab, whatever. Glue goes on with a brush, the tissue goes translucent as it dries, and the whole thing turns into a lamp that glows in their colours. It is the only session where they take home something that has a job. Cut shapes flat on the table first, then stick; going straight at the sphere ends in a wrinkled mess.

A Message For Mom And Dad*

The kid writes one short thing on a scrap of canvas in fabric marker, a message, a list of everyone in the house, their own name, and then it gets stitched in black thread, exactly as they wrote it. Wobbly letters and all: that is the whole point. It comes back matted in a plain black frame and goes home as the last thing at the show. Parents cry. Every time.

Parents In Action

One big stretched canvas lives on a table by the door for the whole run. Every week the parents get fifteen minutes on it, the tail of drop-off, or standing about waiting at pick-up, and each week has one instruction and one material. Nobody signs up, nobody has to be good, and nobody paints for more than a quarter of an hour. By week six it is a single dense painting made by twenty adults who mostly haven’t held a brush since school. It hangs at the show and goes to the classroom.

Animal Ceramics

Every kid draws one animal, their own pet, or a whale, or something invented with too many legs, in black pen on white paper. Between sessions the drawings get printed onto waterslide decal sheet. Then it is the good part: soak the decal for thirty seconds, slide the paper away, float the animal onto a plain white plate and squeegee the water out from under it with a thumb. A wobbly biro creature becomes a proper piece of tableware in about a minute, and they eat off it that night.

One Small Canvas Each

Everybody in the room paints, kids, parents, whoever came with them. Each person gets one 20 × 25 cm canvas and one prompt drawn from a hat, and nobody is allowed to swap. The prompts are small and specific enough that no one has to invent an idea from nothing: the view from your kitchen window, your favourite meal, a pattern you keep seeing, the last animal you touched. Every canvas goes up in one tight grid on the wall, small ones next to each other, no frames, no captions until later. The grid is the artwork; the individual squares are the pixels.

Paint You Can Feel

A whole session about thickness. The canvas gets one flat background colour first, then everything on top of it is built out of stiff paint, heavy body acrylic cut with texture paste, dropped on in blobs and dragged into petals with a cheap fan brush. Each blob is one flick of the wrist and reads as a flower without anybody drawing a flower. Kids stick their fingers in it, which is fine and is the point: it dries in ridges you can still feel at the show.

Everyone Gets A Square

One canvas as big as the room allows, masked into a grid of squares with low-tack tape before anyone arrives. Every kid claims a corner and fills their own squares however they like, a rabbit, a stripe, a handprint, solid yellow. Nobody has to coordinate with anybody. The tape comes off at the end and the white gridlines pull thirty unrelated little paintings into one object that reads, from across the room, as a single deliberate piece. It is the strongest thing the club will make and it is the one they all point at.

Fifty Balls And One Disco Ball

Fifty ping-pong balls glued into a shadow box in a tight grid, the whole surface sprayed one flat colour, then flicked over with a squeeze bottle of neon. Last move: prise one ball out and set a mirrored disco ball in the gap. The piece is basically free, it takes ninety minutes flat, and it is the only week where the finished object is genuinely shiny, which is the whole reason it earns a place.

Playful Transformation

First half is loose watercolour: wet paper, big washes, colours bleeding into each other, no subject at all. Then the turn, the sheets dry, and a 3″ butterfly punch turns those washes into thirty butterflies. Nobody paints a butterfly. Every butterfly comes out of a painting they made without knowing what it was for, which is the whole lesson.

Recycle Your Drawings

Ask every family to bring the drawer, the backlog of paintings nobody can throw away and nobody can hang. We cut all of it up. Kids scissor their own work into shapes, hunt for the good bits in each other’s, and glue the lot onto one tall panel as a single composition: a rainbow arc here, a cat that survived intact there, a hundred offcuts of colour filling in between. Nothing is thrown away, one thing goes on a wall, and the drawer is empty. Say the cutting rule out loud at the start, you only cut your own, and it stays calm.

Street Art

Equal parts flour and water, a squirt of dish soap, a good glug of tempera, funnelled into squeeze bottles, it comes out as a fat raised line that sits up off the concrete like piped icing. The kids take the pavement outside the venue and draw it up. Nothing survives: the first rain takes the lot. So the actual artwork is the photograph. Every kid gets ten minutes with the camera at the end, shooting their own piece from standing, from crouching, from the ground, and those prints are what hangs at the show, framed, with the drawing itself long gone.

Eyes On Me

Photograph every kid’s eyes, just the eyes, a letterbox strip, nothing else. Printed and mounted on coloured card, then hung at head height on lengths of thread so the whole room fills with pairs of eyes turning slowly. On the back of each card, in their own writing: I love my mum because… and whatever they said. Parents walk in and have to find their own child. They always do, immediately, and then they read the back. It is the cheapest session in the programme and the one that makes somebody cry.

Pizza Party

A clean pizza box opened and stood up is a free easel, a paint tray and a carry case in one object. Deb draws a loose shape scene inside each lid the night before, a house made of a triangle and a square, a star on a string, a bee, and the kids paint into it. The corrugated card drinks the colour so nothing runs. Boxes fold shut with the wet painting safe inside, and then the real pizza turns up. It is the last week of a cohort and it is the one they tell their friends about.

Cleaning Crew Art

A pack of supermarket washing-up sponges is the entire material list. Dropped face down in shallow ink, each sponge drinks the colour and dries with a soft gradient nobody could paint on purpose. Then the sponges become tiles. The group lays them out on the table, shuffling and swapping until the whole surface reads as one field of colour, hot corner here, cold patch there. It is the only session where the making takes twenty minutes and the arranging takes an hour, and it is the best argument in the programme for how much composition a six year old already understands.

Painted Buds

Lay a plastic bottle on card, trace a fat vase silhouette around it, cut two of them and tape the curved edges so the paper stands in a shallow shell. The bottle goes inside and holds the water; the paper is pure decoration. Then they paint the vase they wish they owned: pale watercolour washes first, flowers and birds and scalloped rims in black liner on top once it dries. A rose goes in on the way out. Every kid walks home carrying something that looks like it came from a shop.

The Big Art Show

All three cohorts on the walls at once, hung properly, at the height of the person who made it. Opening night is the loud one: the artists are there, standing next to their own work, and they do the talking. After that the show stays up and quiet for a full week and the following weekend, so grandparents, neighbours and anybody who works Saturdays can still walk through it. Every piece carries a label with a title, materials and one line by the artist, and a small green dot if it is for sale.

One finished piece from every session, in the order the cohorts made them. Drop the photograph of your own room’s work over each. Nothing is cropped to fit: every cell takes the shape of the photograph in it, so a tall piece stays tall and a parent can find their kid’s week at a glance.

Cohort A TK, K and 1st grade

07 Sticky Dots

06 Hands And Feet Dirty

18 Recycle Your Drawings

20 Eyes On Me

21 Pizza Party

Cohort B 2nd and 3rd grade

14 Paint You Can Feel

08 Stamping Away

16 Fifty Balls And One Disco Ball

05 Pour It On A Basketball

03 Object-ive Art

Cohort C 4th and 5th grade

15 Everyone Gets A Square

01 Painting With Stuffies

09 Paper Moons

17 Playful Transformation

19 Street Art

Four pieces nobody made alone. These hang together on the long wall, and they are the ones that go to sealed bid.

02 Collective Self-Portraits
One board, all twenty-four kids, added to across three cohorts

11 Parents In Action
Fifteen minutes at a time, by the support crew, by the door

22 Cleaning Crew Art
Deb and the crew, one sponge per clean-up, a year of them

10 A Message For Mom And Dad*
Not for sale. Handed over framed on the night, one per family

Any piece with a green dot is for sale, and the artist chose to sell it. Prices are flat by size, not by how good a grown-up thinks it is, and the whole amount goes to the school art budget. Nothing leaves the wall until the show comes down on 31 May, so the artist gets the full nine days of seeing their work hang.

Reserve a piece
Scan at the wall to put your name against a green dot, or to place a sealed bid on one of the three group pieces. Payment on collection, 31 May.