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For our 5th session, the Lion Animodule had already been created and delivered to the school.  So we brought supplies so that we can all prime the Lion Animodule. We set up the pieces on the tables and told the students what we would be doing. We explained that priming, is basically painting the Lion Animodule with a special white paint, that protects the wood and also helps smooth the surface for painting as well and gives it a good foundation, so the paint colors on top appear nice and bright.  We gave everyone Creation Nation t-shirts to protect their clothing and showed them how to apply the paint. Long smooth brushstrokes, so theres no steaks on the surface. In no time we finished priming 1 side of both pieces of the Lion Animodule. We will have to do the other sides in the next session. For the remaining of the time, we gave everyone back their individual designs back, so they could continue refining and adding to their Lion Animodule drawings.

Due to Thanksgiving, a snow day, teacher conferences, it had been 3 weeks since we last met with the Belmont Runyon students. So we had a recap of everything we had done. We went over the words we had chosen, the images and we overlooked the Exquisite Corpses we had all made from the previous meeting. Since last time everyone worked on everyone else’s drawings, we thought now would be a good time to each give them their own to independently work on. We got some great art out of the students, with some designs that will surely end up in the final design of the Lion Animodule.

For our 3rd session we got more hands on. We made sure everyone has a copy of the moodboard collage to keep as inspiration and we did a drawing exercise with the students. We created an Exquisite Corpse. An Exquisite Corpse is a drawing technique created by surrealist artist in the 1920s. It started out as a game played by the surrealist artists but has become a renowned technique used by artists for collaboration and creation. In an Exquisite Corpse, each artist starts with her or his own piece of paper. They get a set amount of time, after which they would have to give their work to the person on their left, who would continue the drawing for the set amount of time. This keeps going in a circle, till every person has drawn on every other person’s paper and the drawings are complete. For our students, we gave them a 2 minute limit for drawing and we went around 4 or 5 times, so everyone got to draw on every piece of papers 4 or 5 times. This exercise loosens their inhibitions when it comes to drawing and lets them know there are no mistakes. It also makes them think about the project in a collaborative way because they have to take into consideration the drawing of the other students already on the page, when adding their own. At the end of the exercise we ended up with 8 great pieces and lots of inspiration for when we begin the final designing of the Lion Animodule.

In our second session meeting with the students from Belmont Runyon, we introduced them to the lion design their Animodule would be in. We continued by asking the students to come up with words that define themselves, their school, their community and their culture. These words would serve as inspiration for imagery used on the design of the lion Animodule as well as words used directly on the Animodule itself.