BIG Brave Characters - SEND THEM IN!

One week left to send in your contributions to the  

BIG and BRAVE CHARACTERS ART CONTEST.

A BIG/Mini and Maximus Collaboration. Send your BIG and BRAVE character to info@miniandmaximus.com by Wednesday August 15th to be in the running to feature on the next MIMA range AND in BIG. Draw one today!

Twyla, age 3

Twyla, age 3

Luca, age 9

Side by Side at Sydney HQ

'Side by Side' is the philosophy of BIG Kids Magazine to feature the work of kids and artists on the same page, disrupting hierarchies and provoking new ways of seeing.

Twyla and I often work side by side collaborating seriously on images, or singing and making playful marks on a shared page. We don't usually decide what we are going to draw although very often we create some kind of figures or characters that can inhabit the stories we make up. Often the beautiful traces of our paintings end up being lost underneath the sudden fall of night and a whole page covered in black paint, or someone's hair grown so long that it covers up everything that has come before. Other times I whisk the work away while the characters are still visible and we begin a second and third piece continuing a meandering story line or dipping in to make believe tales of long lost brothers and ogre's from bad dreams. 

If you would like to try collaborating with your child you could try the following to get you started:

• Draw a circle for a head and invite your child to draw the face. Talk about ears and eye brows and hair, hats and bow ties, wrinkles and ear rings and rosy cheeks. 

• Draw the body slowly so your child has time to jump in and add arms or legs. 

• Concentrate on details like patterns on shoes or clothing that your child might like to extend or design in their own way. 

I love finding ways to say 'yes' to all the marks that Twyla makes on our shared page rather than trying to direct or curb her impulses. We have been collaborating on work since she first held a paintbrush and have a shared vocabulary now that has accumulated between us.  

Hopscotch Character in response to Game On!
By Lilly Blue and Twyla, age 3

Mother and Child
By Lilly Blue and Twyla, age 3

Picasso to Warhol - get a BIG discount!

The Picasso to Warhol: Fourteen Modern Masters exhibition opens at the Art Gallery of Western Australia tomorrow. It is the first of six major  exhibitions to be shown from The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.  The exhibition features work by a collection of artists who transformed the art and culture of the twentieth century including Henri Matisse, Louise Bourgeois, Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, Jasper Johns and Jackson Pollock as well as Picasso, Warhol and more.  


The gallery is offering 20% off general admission tickets just by mentioning "BIG Kids" on booking.  Enjoy!  For those (many of you!) outside of WA, we will be teaming with our senior ed to bring you a BIG review very soon :) 

Creative Ideas for Contributing to Game On! EDITION 3

The BIG Treasure Maps edition is flying all over the world and now it is time to send in your ideas and artwork for the next (THIRD!) issue of BIG Kids Magazine - Game On! 

This is what's inside my brain when I play
Aimee, age 4, Brisbane

We want to make contributing to BIG Kids Magazine as easy as possible.  Here are the first of some BIG ideas for supporting your kids to understand the process of responding to the theme of Game On! and helping them enter into an open ended creative process in which they are also guided by simple parameters. Feel free to collaborate with them or create your own work Side by Side. 

- What is your favourite game of all time? Close your eyes and imagine playing the game. Imagine winning. Imagine losing. Draw the inside of your brain or heart when you are winning and/or when you are losing.

- Create a brand new game character that no one else has thought of. Does it have a name? What invented game is it from? 

 - Draw/paint/collage/dance/write your response to a character from a game you love - the Horse, Castle or Queen from Chess, a snake from Snakes and Ladders, the 'Chance' man from Monopoly...

- Close your eyes and draw shapes and lines all over a page. Open your eyes and make up the rules of the game you have just drawn. 

- Think of something you would like to learn. Make up a game that would help you learn it. 

- Write a story about the scariest, funniest or cleverest game ever invented. 

The GAME ON! Edition - Play every page

Submissions due by JUNE 1st
If you are an artist or child who wants to register for the Child Artist Response Project (CARP) send and email to submit@bigkidsmagazine.com with CARP in the subject line

Side by Side: Father and Son: Wandermonster

The creative projects we come across in our BIG reach out around the world are quite something. Rob Kimmel is a designer and dad to 8yr old Ben. For years he has been sending a yellow sticky note in Ben's school lunch box with a provocation his son completes each day to surprising end!

We are thrilled to present this truly responsive work and introduce you to Rob's Wandermonster blog which features their daily before and after micro-artworks. In the BIG pages there is the opportunity to complete your own sticky art notes and this page was one of the first senior editor Luca and his brother took their pens to with much hilarity and great discussion.

The Lunch Posts on Wandermonster from rob ben on Vimeo.

BIG Kids Magazine Page 23: Wandermonster

Send one in your child's lunch box today with a little pencil attached with blutack for instant schoolyard responses!

Beyond The Frame - A BIG idea from Art in All of Us

 We greatly admire the vision of Art in All of Us in reaching 100000 children through art activities in schools around the world since its inception in 2005. Founder Anthony Asael instigated the program to promote tolerance and cultural exchange through art to stimulate the creativity and the curiosity of children.

This latest project is the most beautiful response-based idea connecting children from different countries in a visceral and immediate dialogue about the way they see the world around them. Children are given photographs from a particular place (not theirs) and asked to imagine beyond the borders to continue drawing the map past the edges of what is 'seen'. In this way,  a new work of art is created extending the original image and provoking ideas of the continuing links between people and places.

Children working on Beyond the Frame in Brazil

Art in All of Us - Beyond the Frame Beyond the Imagination project: 

Stick a photograph in the middle of a very large sheet of paper. Look carefully at the image and discuss what is in it. What might lie beyond its borders? After discussion, each child in the group can help to draw on the paper, around the image, what the group has agreed lies beyond the frame.