The park district building is in the middle of a forest, with the parking lot nestled in a dense thicket of trees. Jerry pulled up in his car, next to the building. As he got out and prepared to roll our things in for our latest painting workshop, his aunt Sue got out of the passenger’s seat.
She was a wearing red pants and a brand new sweatshirt, white with red and yellow on it meant to look like dripping paint. A bold choice for a workshop where’d we be painting with a bunch of kids. Jerry told me to start moving tables and painting supplies inside.
In no time at all we had tables set up, with canvases, paintbrushes, and paints for everyone. Jerry set up the whiteboard, and began to draw a series of tiki masks. He told me, before the workshop, that the kids rarely paint these masks, but it gives them a face to look at for inspiration.
The kids began to show up, mostly familiar faces from our recent comic book workshops. Jerry told them to start drawing with the pencil and paper he’d given them, saying as always to “draw me WACKY!” He drew attention to his own shirt, a salmon-colored button down with little lobsters on it. Inspired by this I drew him as a cocktail shrimp, proudly announcing that he’d fried a bowl of rice.
With our hands and our imaginations warmed up, we all began to paint. I took the tiki masks as a point of departure, but like Jerry said most of the kids preferred to follow their own inspiration. One kid painted his own original comic book character. One girl painted Jerry’s plush toy of Bob Ross as he sat in a yellow chair at the front of the room. Another girl chose to paint with a black canvas, and blew us all away with a cascade of pearl-white in the middle, and flower patterns like stars on the black canvas.
Painting isn’t quite like drawing with pencil. I told Jerry later that I think there’s something about the repetitive feeling of putting a brush to canvas, adding more and more paint with each stroke, that gives painting a kind of hypnotic feeling. The kids enjoyed mixing colors more than anything, playing with splotches of acrylic paint on their paper plates almost as much as they engaged with their own creations on canvas. We had a large canvas set up at the front of the room, next to plushie Bob Ross, and by the end of the workshop it was covered in brown goo, mixed from a panoply of colors by one kid who’d vowed to create the “blackest black possible.”
I made a version of a mask face, using the Luigi hat Jerry had worn at the beginning of the workshop for inspiration, eyes and mouth done with dark purple, hot pink for spikes coming out of the face shape. The beauty of the “tiki masks,” I reflected, is that the simple nose/eyes/mouth shapes create a face that stares back at you, much as comics use simple lines to represent eyes, nose, and mouth to create emotional expression. With this simple template you can make all kinds of interesting, WACKY ideas your own!
The workshop lasted 2 hours, but time seemed to fly by as we and kids engaged with the joy of painting, and mixing colors. Jerry kept the kids painting, and drawing, throughout. One kid, a great lover of comics, even made several volumes of his comic adventures, while he made paintings of the comics “covers” he came up with.
Sue painted a kind of kitty mask (in keeping with her great love of cats), an abstract yellow square with nose and whiskers. She also added some pink accents to the brown canvas at the front of the room, to which we all added our names. Parents showed up to pick up their kids, and admire the amazing things they’d painted. As we packed up our supplies and left, Sue marveled: not only had we all painted some AMAZING things, but she didn’t get any paint on her brand new clothes!
