ABOUT ME

Fotografia mea
Plymouth, United Kingdom
CHILDREN'S BOOK ILLUSTRATOR AND ART-TEACHER .................................................................................................... A Decorative Arts and Design graduate with experience in art-teaching and children’s book illustration. Proven professional record of teaching art in prestigious schools in my hometown, and also illustrating for publishers and personal projects. I started as an very important co-worker as an illustrator when I was a student at the National University of Arts, Bucharest and comic artist for Romanian children’s magazines, Luminita and Cutezatorii.

31 iulie 2013

The Illustration Club at the The International Conference "Teachers for the Knowledge Society" Sinaia Romania 2011 as THE DESIGN CLUB

The Design Club    by prof. Laura Nitu


Abstract
The paper presents the results of a research into an extracurricular activity for Art students, which we call The Design Club. This involves a master-disciple learning partnership intended to improve the traditional relationship between the Art teacher and her students. The main aims of the club are to encourage talented teenagers to practice the techniques of book illustration and to learn how to make public their works. The club also promotes a social dimension of learning – the students come together and have the opportunity to discuss and support one another even if finally their products remain individual ones.
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Keywords: learning partnership; master-disciple;  extracurricular activity;  art education; book illustration
Introduction
Book illustration is hardly a focus of the Art Education curriculum in Romania, this particular domain being rather marginal in the Art teachers’representations as well. Nevertheless, some Art students have the potential to develop their graphic skill. I always propose some design exercises to the students at the beginning of the term and each year I can see some very good work. Actually, Art students can be seen quite often drawing comics or cartoons. They do it without any clear purpose, they do it without guidance, in isolation. Some of their results are exceptional and yet nobody in the Art highschool takes it into account.     
This is how I came to the idea to support the students’ talent and interests by inviting them to an extracurricular activity that focuses on the practice of the techniques of book illustration. My intention was to gather in a club those who are interested in drawing, to challenge them with exercises that stimulate creativity but also with topics they would have never worked on without the advice of an expert.
Besides the training in book illustration, the Design Club also tries to solve some other problems that the young  participants face. These are old problems in Art Education in Romania and nobody seems interested to solve them as it is more comfortable to forget about it. I faced these problems myself when I was a student in the same school where I am teaching now. I understand very well my students’ expectations, questions and needs. Not long ago I was ruminating on them from the teenager perspective.  The youth that are enrolled in Art school lack confidence, are demotivated, quite often approach Art in a superficial way, are afraid of failure, and above all they are not taught about the importance of a portfolio with personal works and sketches. All these are connected with the little involvement of the Art teachers in the actual development of their students. The teachers do not have a vision for their students’ future. What they are doing after graduation is not a matter of concern, generally speaking.
I decided not to ignore the “state of the arts” and to support my students. I considered a different type of relationship that could inspire both of us. With my experience as a book illustrator I could try to help them become more than real artists but independant, responsible, disciplined and target-oriented personalities as well.
That was the starting point of the Design Club and of the research the partial results of which are presented here.

The foundations of the Club
The participants at the club (and the target group of my research) are 15-17 year olds who showed interest in book illustration, chose to join the club and who belong to all the three specializations of our vocational Art Highschool, that is Music, Visual Arts, Architecture. They are all very gifted but the school they attend is more interested in preserving its traditions than in reorienting towards contemporary trends. This is how the students  become demotivated and quite superficial. My first goal besides the technical solution of persuading them to develop portfolios – like real artists, was to find ways to encourage them to go deeper into their skill and talents.
The theory of the multiple intelligences (MI) and the more recent developments regarding the ‘five minds’ (Gardner, 2004, 2006, 2007) helped me with valuable insight. The readings from Gardner made me to admit that Romanian Art Education lacked purpose. Parents and teachers persuade the students to choose the Art School but nobody thinks of what they can do with their competence later on. Students are not encouraged to reflect on this issue. Instead of training genuine artists, who can benefit from the niches in the society and create cultural assets as well as cultivate a public for their Art, the present education just provides a technicist training. There is no perspective for life outside the school walls. The teachers themselves are technicians when they come to class and they ask the students to obediently repeat a technique.
When I started teaching in the Art School I knew for sure that I do not want to be that kind of teacher. Yet, until the beginning of the Design Club I couldn’t name the exact type of teacher I desired to be for my students. The planning for an extracurricular activity reminded me of the Renaissance apprenticeship model. Artistry had been learned like that for centuries and it was successful both in terms of technical acquisition and artistic value (Gardner, 2006). The Design Club could reinvent such apprenticeship and my research could document our changes. My statement of the study became the following: The constant support offered by the expert illustrator propels the disciples towards recognition of their talent and results.
I view this relationship as a learning partnership where both sides have the opportunity to progress in remarkable ways. When I stepped into this partnership I started to reconsider my schemes of thinking – I was no longer just an artist by myself – but one who needed to adapt to the needs of the disciples (otherwise the latter could quit the club!). The students who turn into disciples try to better know their master’s craft, attempt at doing something similar in a global sense not just like nowadays when they repeat a technique. The ‘master’ is an artist with a developed personality which is not hidden from the ‘apprentices’. The transfer is not merely technical but an interconnection comprising various issues, the esthetic and ethical values included.
Values are fairly important but we tend to marginalize them in school because we do not know how exactly we can deal with them in the absence of the authoritarian inculcation. At the club we have the courage to talk about our choices and deal with the issues that concern values.
Last but not least, as a ‘master’ I am tuned with each individual who comes at the club. The special relationship we develop makes me to apply an individualized approach for book illustration, which is adapted to individual-artists-to-be. This important feature of the methodology at the Design Club involves a flexible planning within the theoretical framework of the illustration as it is understood and agreed upon by the experts in the field.
The book illustration is meant to explain or to be complementary to a text, sometimes highlighting some parts of the text, but it is always influenced by the personality and the interpretation of the artist (Brown 1958, Carneci, 1981). The artist can retell the information in the text in a descriptive way or s/he can improve it by adding a personal touch to it, while tempting the imagination of the receiver. The illustration can also be extremely decorative, without a clear connection to the text as such but by enriching the reception of the reader. Whether the illustration is literary, scientific, didactic or for entertainment purposes, it is always in an interdisciplinary connection. The illustrator needs to understand the domain that s/he is illustrating and also to operate with communication competence both visually and verbally. At this point, book illustration represents a generous topic that relates naturally to an MI-based approach and to the educational trend that pleads for integrated perspectives in the class.
In order to keep track of my study about the partnership’s benefits and to check the statement mentioned above I use a research diary of our face to face meetings that are scheduled every other day and use observation grids for the students’work during the class sessions as well as for the analysis of their drawings and of their developing portfolios. During the observation of the learning process within the club my criteria refer to interpersonal communication and its role for building my students’ confidence. One of the assets of the Club is the group discussion about the text meanings, the choice of techniques, the impact on the receiver. I assume (but I need to prove) that the work at the club develops communication among students that are trained to work in isolation and that communication builds their positive self  as future artists. The analysis grid for the portfolio is intended to mark the progress they make in the illustration competences as shown in the passage from one drawing to another. Contrary to the traditional view that only the final – perfect! – work is worth keeping I’m trying to raise my students’awareness about their learning acquisition by the recording of all the intermediate products, in the sense of a “processfolio” (Gardner, 2006).

Work in the Design Club
      The first steps in the club were taken in order to encourage an ongoing communication among us (between the face to face sessions) as well as the promotion of our work. Consequently during the summer months of 2010 I worked along with a few IT experts to develop our site. The students’ effort to work some extra time beyond the compulsory curriculum needed to be publicised, so we thought of starting an online magazine with illustated texts. So far the site was successfully launched, but the magazine is still a draft.
      Among the first steps, I could also count my thorough planning and the lobby in the school to obtain support from the principal – mainly an adequate environment for our Club meetings. In both directions I was not very successful. To the present we still lack a space of our own. We need to go into a classroom where the young students are out for PE. Their belongings are on the desks and moreover they come back after 50 minutes and for the last part of our club meeting (which is scheduled for two hours) we move into another classroom the occupants of which go to the Computer Room for their IT class. This is quite unconfortable.
    As far as the planning is concerned – In the beginning of the “club work” I planned a lot and also made a lot of mistakes. It is well known that every start is difficult! The first official meeting of the Club was the result of such a planning miscalculation. I suggested them to do an illustration of the 10th Sonnet of Michelangelo. I started with this piece of literature because Michelangelo is a total artist who changes so easily the representational codes in his art. He was meant to be an inspiration for the future book illustrator. Secondly, my choice was motivated by the generous nature of poetry when it comes to visual interpretation. Thirdly, I love poetry. My miscalculation was that my students do not exactly have a taste for it.  I was also surprised they ignored the meanings of some of the words in the poem. I had planned that first session by the point of view of the traditional teacher who looks to her students by the binoculars of her personality, likes and dislikes. Nevertheless the club discussions on the text analysis, the look at the Renaissance art in albums  supported the students in coming closer to what I intended to do and some of the drawings they did were quite good. Yet I was very unsatisfied and shared with my final dissertation supervisor about the shortcomings of the first club event. The discussion with another type of a “master” mobilised me to go through the planning again and came up with a story for the next meeting.
    Full of renewed hope, I read them the beginning of The Prince and the Pauper by making use of adequate intonation. I shared from my experience as book illustrator by giving a speech about the illustration’s composition, and layout. I told them the illustration should not tell the story but offer the reader a reason to meditate upon as well as a reason to admire the craft of the illustrator. Here is a part of the dialogue we had during the “Prince” meeting:
“Teacher: What is the fragment about? Who is it about?
Student 1: About two boys...
Student 2: I’d rather say it’s just one
Student 1: Well, there’s the prince and there’s the pauper
Student 2: Sure. But it’s as if someone had a first look in the mirror of a lake and observed himself with the eyes of the other
Student 1: Humm. That’s rather philosophical, don’t you think?
Teacher : Well, what do you think we are? As artists are we imitators of the reality or interpreters of it?
Student 1: Humm…”
      They liked this idea of them being interpreters of the world. They seemed very thoughtful. We talked for an hour about the role of illustration. They made some drawings but very few caught my attention. My students had started to be reflective but they were still inhibated, they were not exactly in the right mood to create original ideas. I was happy though because I had managed a breakthrough. (see Fig. 1 below).

Fig. 1 The first breakthrough – The Prince and the Pauper

     The first month at the Club was full of ups and downs. All of them surprised me. These surprises do say something about my adjusting to the ‘master’ status. The diary helped me a lot to reflect on “the surprise” and to find a positive interpretation of it plus some added value for my research.
     An interesting discussion about the results of the club is the attitude and skill of the ‘master’. What is a master in this respect? An expert artist who can share from his/her experiences? The fourth and fifth meetings of the Club brought two complementary answers to my question.
We had decided to participate as a group to an exhibition on the topic The text(ures) of the postmodern city. Our work is supposed to be a visual essay about the postmodern city, about the street sensitivity. For more flavour at the club I had invited Liviu Ghituleasa, one of the organizers of the event and a very opened and relaxed teacher to explain the objectives of the exhibition to my students. I had hoped this will stir their interest, make them curious but they received him with silence. Only after Liviu left the classroom, had they started to ask questions. The sophisticated language that expert had used made them feel inferior. They actually couldn’t understand very well what was all about and they were quite fearful about being involved in that experiment-exhibition. Liviu Ghituleasas is definitely an expert but when he came to the club he did not manage to be the least of a “master”.
The second answer came soon after, again in the context of an art event. We visited The European BD exhibition in Bucharest in October 2010 and we participated in the workshop of Olivier Grenson, a very gifted and famous Belgian comics artist. And a ‘master’ as I soon could observe. The club members were thrilled about the exercises he did with them. Some of the students had brought their portfolios along and they could show to Olivier how talented they are. The dialogue between the artist and the students was extremely profitable, he encouraged them and praised one of the girls for her portfolio. Olivier also had the patience to correct some of the works of my students. He gave them the same items of advice I did. He told them they need to practice drawing, use the axes and do sketches. He also told them to thoroughly read and look for complementary information before they draw and also to use photographs during the work so that they keep to the truth when they represent scenes, objects, attitudes, persons...
The encounter with Olivier was a great step forward for the club partnership – for the students it was good to work with a recognised artist who earns a living from his art. For me it was a good lesson of ‘mastership’. Explaining is good but involving everyone in the practical excercise all in the same time is far better. When we got back from the European exhibition we remade one of the Belgian artist’s exercises – create a character, first from a frontal perspective and then from different other perspectives. The results were fine and discussion and attitude were excellent. We could even face the Postmodern Text(ures) project with different eyes. The students came out with interesting ideas about it.
After a new replanning on my behalf, our last experience at the club dealt with the schoolbook illustration. I had realised the club started quite awkwardly as I had not involved them first in illustration for books from their immediate environment. I had rather put them into the shoes of the adult which obviously they were not. Consequently we looked at some Romanian and French textbooks, we discussed the illustrations and identified mistakes. We tested some representations for books in the primary education by trying to put ourselves in the place of the young readers. This was the first topic they really enjoyed. I could see their interest and commitment to do a good job. And the results indeed were good since they had the opportunity to make something useful and admired by adults.
The Club participants got involved in designing the setting for the 4 graders’ end of term play. We had an initial discussion and then they did the job. They did it autonomously and enthusiastically, by improvising when they fixed the set - so it should fit better – like genuine artists. I could not be present when the event took place, but here is the account from one of the students:  “The class teacher insisted that we stay and introduced us as our friends from the Design Club who did this extraordinary set. We received a great applause. And later the students, the teachers and the parents - they all praised us. This was cool. We are not very used to praises and it feels good. I loved it.”  The ‘extraordinary set’ was the fruit of excellent teamwork, a lot of endeavour (they spent twelve hours during two afternoons) and self-confidence. It was also a good promotion for the Club. We even received an offer – to paint the walls of the classroom where the play took place. The class teacher was thrilled with the students’ talent in illustrations for children and since the next school year she will take 1st graders she invited us during the summer holidays to decorate the classroom!

Conclusions – The Club is still on
The learning partnership we are building is a challenging experience that requires a lot of perseverance. It is not easy to be a ‘master’. The quick response I had when I saw Olivier at work and my desire to do the same shows I am a good ‘disciple’, or maybe just a more advanced one as compared to my students. My study so far does not contradict my hypothesis – it shows that the relationship, the perspective on learning and the practical experience together do motivate the students. The Design Club is visited on a regular basis by non-member students who are curious about what we are doing; the IT teacher is also a regular visitor and we will try a cooperation; we have an offer from a class teacher; the atmosphere is pleasant and students feel safe to create originally and to share their work as well as albums and other sources; the online activity is growing; there are Art teachers in the school who encourage our experiences, talk to the students and praise their work. There are some who criticise my initiative which they call “kitsch”.
As the strengths are far “stronger” than the “weaknesses” in our partnership, the club is still on and works well.  My study will continue at least to the end of the academic year when I am to present the results in my dissertation for the master degree. But my hope is this research is just one step in an ongoing partnership.

Acknowledgements
I express my gratitude towards my former highschool colleagues Irinel Ditu and Stefan Buturuga who supported me in developing the site of the Club. A big thank you goes to my students Andrei Ionut Carpen and Ioana Dragomir who worked along me during the summer holidays to make the site of the club functional.
Last but not least I thank all of my students who support me become a valuable part in a learning partnership

References
Brown, Marcia (1958)  Distinction in Picture Book, in Dalphin, M., Vigures R-H, Miller, B. Illustrators of children’s books 1946-1956 , Boston: The Horn Book INC.
Cârneci, Magda (1981)  The Book Illustration  (in Romanian) in Art nr. 9/ 1981
Gardner, Howard (2005)  The Disciplined Mind (in Romanian) Bucuresti: Sigma
Gardner, Howard (2006) Multiple Intelligences. New Horizons (in Romanian) Bucuresti: Sigma
Gardner, Howard (2007) Five minds for the future (in Romanian) Bucuresti: Sigma