Master Class by Professional Artists

On September 25, 2016 a group of artists conducted a master class for the students of the Helena Roerich Academy of Arts for Children, IRMT, Naggar. 

As there were three demonstrators, the students were divided into three classes: Painting, Collage, and Crafts.

Prof. Sadhna Sangar, Joint Director, Сolleges, Punjab, took the collage class. She demonstrated to the students how to make collage landscapes and other pictures making use of the simplest imaginable material at hand: wastepaper. Pages of old magazines containing colour photographs and ads can be easily torn up into fragments and then glued to paper forming a new picture. This improves students’ imagination and their sense of composition and colour. Subsequently the picture may be enhanced and finished with watercolours. Within the span of half an hour using the described technique Prof. Sangar created a still life of flowers in a pot, a landscape and a picture depicting several playful fish.

Mrs. Kiran Sharma, HoD, Dept. of Fine Arts, Arya Girls PG College, Shahabad, Kurukshetra, Haryana, took the painting class that mostly attracted senior students. She introduced them to the rules of perspective and demonstrated how to depict houses in a landscape, birds and then colour them with crayons. She showed the students the simplified way of drawing peacocks, herons, ducks, swans and parrots by joining two “eggs” and adding minor details.

The youngest and by far the biggest group of the Academy students joined the crafts class conducted by Mrs. Sandhya Ray, Fine Arts Teacher, Maharaja Ranjit Singh Police Public School, Phillore. Under her supervision the children left their coloured handprints on a big sheet of paper. The handprints were arranged in such a way as to form a tree, with the artists giving it a finishing touch with her brush. She then asked them to leave their thumb impressions and when they happily did so she developed each impression into a bird with a couple of brushstrokes. At the end, the coloured impressions of the outer edges of the children’s palms arranged closely to one another were developed into large and beautiful flowers. She also demonstrated how to make simple decorative items from a couple of pine twigs by joining them together with scotch and adding colourfully painted cotton wicks to simulate flowers. 

These group activities combining fun with basic education proved popular with the young audience.