Week 3 – Can’t knock the classics!

This week I brought some reference cards and foldover clips along and flipbooks were made. I had several examples which were eagerly thumbed through. Only a couple of people really got into flipbook making but I’ll bring more supplies next week and I think other people will come around to it. I think it might seem a bit of a daunting task as there is a fair amount of drawing involved. Really you need at least 20 pages to get a good flip on the go and you have to draw every page from scratch so it isn’t like stop motion where you can just move a thing and take a picture.

Some people are quite self conscious about their drawing abilities and so an iPad came out again to play along with a bit of Lego. Again; some excellent minifigure walking was produced. I don’t know if some people are less keen to leave their comfort zones than others or if the people who will try a wider range of things have a larger comfort zone to begin with. I’d like to to be able to instill the message that it is fine if something isn’t quite right or even looks bad because you can learn from it and move forward.

A roaring success of this week’s session was the praxinoscope. A Victorian persistence of vision toy where drawings on a disc are reflected in a cone of mirrors  and when you spin it the drawings come alive. Some wonderful things were made with this from bouncing balls through to some pretty nifty abstract shapes. I think it’s popularity comes down to the immediacy of the device. you do some drawings on a bit of paper, put it on the praxinoscope and give it a spin. Then you see moving pictures right away.   Next week I hope to bring a bigger one which is a bit more like a zoetrope in that you work on a long strip of paper rather than a flat disc.