Children have high curiosity levels and this ensures they are always exploring things. They have a vivid imagination which if nurtured will lead them to become creative individuals in the long term. Using hands and visual correlation is essential in the creative process. The more you do it, the more one can sharpen their skills. As a brand, we have always been passionate about art and we want to be at the forefront of all based innovation. With this thought, we decided to start engaging kids to allow them to explore their own creative potential and we found community art sessions to be a great way to do this.
THE VENUE
Milton street park is a green, warm and tree-covered park with a small lawn area. It makes you nostalgic about your childhood memories of visiting small parks.Milton Street park is nestled in the cantonment area of Cooke Town in Bangalore. This area has an amazing community feel with every resident of the area feeling passionate about the area, the city as well as activities associated with the area. REWABE is the residential welfare organization in the community who supports a lot of the development in the area and Milton Street Park is one of the few parks managed by this active resident association. Every quarter REWABE conducts the Milton Street Flea and its well-attended by residents and others who appreciate the warm community feel. Hence, we found Milton Street Flea to be the best place to start our community sessions.
OUR JOURNEY
The Talking Canvas is a regular at the flea markets and we conduct our art seasons on the grassy patches of the park. We keep it simple by creating a relaxed ambiance for both parents and kids to come and enjoy their time at the park while also enjoying the sumptuous food and curated stalls put up by residents of the area. Ever since our first pop up art session at the flea, we have had a very positive response.
THEME BASED SESSION
For the last flea market in November, we put a small spread of art materials and waited for our creative artists to stop by and enjoy the creative space we had created. We feel like art is one medium that connects with Kids and Adults. This time around, we decided to conduct a theme based session. Within no time, we had a mix of toddlers, kids, tweens and young adults coming for the Christmas themed session we had put together. Our intention Of having a theme based session was to let kids visualize Christmas, as Christmas was just around the corner and in the process help us curate some designs for new Christmas line. We did a small exercise for all the kids to feel excited about the coming holidays and so they had to visualize and draw ” What Christmas meant to them?”. And to add some excitement, we also gave them canvas’s to paint on!
CREATIVE POTENTIAL
We were amazed by the beautiful drawings that were curated as a part of this exercise. There were a lot of happy green Christmas trees dressed up with ornaments and fairies, snowman with a carrot nose and stick arms, piles of gifts and stockings hanging by the fireplace. The older kids were able to think of more complex happier things like beach holidays and reindeer rides. The kids and their parents showed us some love by drawing and painting Christmas themed artworks for our December collection. And boy, did that make our team super excited!
THE EXCITEMENT
We love our workshop days, which start early morning and go on until the lights fade! A non-judgemental zone were kids come to learn, love and share art. It’s amazing to see the energy, excitement and happiness on the faces of these kids. We had a lot of parents thanking us for taking out the time, engaging kids positively and teaching the kids a new art technique. One of our little artist’s Mom Simran Kapoor says “..its an amazing activity for kids when the mums are walking around shopping and the kids get to do something fun as well”.
Milton street events are a perfect place where we give wings of creativity to children in the community and make community living more fun. These creative little humans inspire us to make more of our products and give us the energy to continue doing what we do. Hoping for more such days filled with laughter and messy little hands filled with rainbow paints!
If you like what we do, please like and share this blog. We would be thrilled if you can leave your comments about the event. Alternatively, if you would like us to hold such sessions within your community spaces, do comment below and we will revert to a plan.
Those of you who would like to volunteer with us for future events can also write to us on thetalkingcanvas.com@gmail.com.