Sticks, pastels and ripped paper: Kids learn new skills at county art guild summer camp

Sixteen kids scribble inside paper booklets and shade in drawings with colored pencils and markers.

They're writing a children's book. One about a pig named Porky that eats penne pasta and becomes a knight. Another about horses. One girl writes about a chicken jockey from "A Minecraft Movie."

They're all participants at the Owen County Art Guild's fourth summer art camp.

Volunteer Leslie Asher helped lead the camp and said the children worked through several projects of different mediums. One of them involved using Indian ink and two-foot long drawing sticks. The kids created monocolored paintings on paper propped against easels.

The children also used pastels to create pastel drawings of green frogs sitting near lily pads in a pond, using their hands to blend the colors.

The young artists did a different project this year, which moved away from what the guild typically does, and created their own children's books, using their imaginations to practice storytelling.

Lucas Smeltzer wrote the story about Porky the pig. He said it's fun to see how silly art can look when it's only halfway finished but also appreciates the reward of a completed work.

"It's kind of challenging when you're doing it, but at the end, I think it's worth it just to see what you came up with and just all of the things you can do," he said.

Felicity Arthur's favorite thing to draw is horses. She said that creating art makes her, "Excited for what it's gonna look like at the end," she said. "I love it a lot."

For one collage project, the children painted a series of squares and drew designs on top. Then, they ripped them into pieces. On another sheet of paper, the kids glued the pieces in a halo of hair around a watercolor painting of a woman in dress.

Not only did the children create pieces of art to take home and present at the art show at the end of the camp, but they created artist trading cards to share with the other participants.

At the end of the five-day camp, Asher and the other volunteers, Sharon Moore and Linda Barrett, taught the kids how to do a gallery walk. Each child created 16 small cards and went around the room trading their original work with the other kids.

"They get a little piece of each person's art," Asher said. "It's very cool."

Asher said that what she enjoys most about leading the camp is watching the kids explore and be creative when creating and designing the different projects.

She hopes the camp gives them "The love of being creative and doing art."