June 17, 2013

The nano-GIGANTIC Drawing Experiment

This weekend, ArtStarts was home to The nano-GIGANTIC Drawing Experiment, our event for Vancouver Draw Down, a city-wide celebration of creativity.

Drawing inspiration (pun intended) from our current exhibition, Botanimalogy, the activities explored concepts of big and small in nature, as most everything in nature has a habit of starting out at a microscopic level and then, all of sudden BANG! Even an idea starts small before it erupts into something huge and amazing.

The first of the five experiments in the ArtStarts Gallery was for visitors to create bugs from paper and plasticine to live on our front windows.

Inside the Gallery, visitors were encouraged to reach for the sky: they used extra-long paintbrushes to paint the shadow of birds flying above them in the sky.

Visitors also sat down with a magnifying glass to examine the tiny details of natural objects. They then then drew those miniscule details as big as they could.

Seated in the Boardroom upstairs, visitors took some time to think about Bitty Beings and Behemoth Beasts (and Everything in Between). The instructions for this activity were to start on the FIRST page of a mini-book and draw the SMALLEST animal they could think of, then turn to the LAST page and draw the BIGGEST animal they could think of. They then filled in all the pages in between with animals that are sized somewhere in between the extremes, putting them in order of size, from smallest to biggest.

Of course, some artists cannot be confined to a page... which is fine with us!

Throughout the day, the ArtStarts Lab was transformed into an old growth forest. Using regular and oversized drawing tools, visitors helped grow an entire forest, from the huge old growth cedar to tiny insects.

Check out this time lapse video of the forest growing:

Thanks to everyone who participated in The nano-GIGANTIC Drawing Experiment at ArtStarts!

See more lots photos from the event in our Facebook album.