Art
Unlock kids' love of art on these colorful trips – National Geographic Traveler Magazine
My daughter was a little over a year old when she first noticed a piece of art. On a family trip to the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, my husband and I relished the woodland paths with elegant works by Paul Matisse and Andy Goldsworthy. Juniper the toddler, though, took a shine to a dripping, oozing fluorescent yellow blob by Aaron Curry called—rather aptly, I think—“Ugly Mess.”
Juniper was transfixed, wandering around the steel sculpture for what seemed like hours. At first I felt impatient, but then I realized I was a witness to baby’s first appreciation of art. My daughter had an aha moment, which helped me see the piece with fresh eyes.
Sparking kids’ creativity and love for travel with art isn’t new. “From a very young age, children start looking extremely closely at the things around them with curiosity and attention,” says Olga Hubbard, a professor of arts education of the Teachers College at Columbia University. This makes museums and other cultural institutions focus on engaging the next generation of sculpture and painting fans with research-backed activities and challenging exhibits designed to appeal to developing brains.
These trips and tips can get your kids into art on your next vacation. They might ignite a renewed sense of wonder in the grown-ups as well. “Spaces like museums can invite adults to have the kind of attention that young children naturally have for the outside world,” says Hubbard.
Because kids naturally like to look—it’s just a matter of finding fresh things to see.
Step into a storybook
The easiest way to introduce a child to an art museum might be through a familiar face, be it the googly eyed Very Hungry Caterpillar or a fairy tale villain. “Picture books are often a child’s first introduction to art,” says Courtney Waring, director of education at the Eric Carle Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts.
At the Carle, original works by the author/illustrator of Caterpillar are displayed along with revolving exhibits devoted to other kid-lit stars. Picture book pages are framed and hung on the walls, presented as priceless artifacts. Little ones can’t touch the originals, but they can paw through thousands of books in the nearby museum library.
(Is this Danish city the fairy tale capital of the world?)
“They immediately make connections between the art they see in books and the art they see in our galleries,” says Waring. Not only can this give children a deeper connection to their bookshelves at home, it also may encourage them to form “human connections across time and space,” says Hubbard.
Children see or sense that their favorite stories came from real people and places, and this goes beyond commercial attractions devoted to Harry Potter. In Kassel, Germany, where Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm gathered and published fairy tales in the 19th century, the contemporary museum Grimmwelt Kassel tells kids not only about classic stories (Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella), but also about the language and history they contain.
In a Buckinghamshire village north of London, England, the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre pays tribute to the late writer of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Fabulous Mr. Fox with exhibits and activities in his former home.
Museum professionals emphasize that provoking intense responses—a fit of giggles at a painting of a familiar Brothers Grimm fable, an awestruck gaze at a way-larger-than-life caterpillar cutout—can give parents insight into what kids intuitively find exciting, beautiful, or strange. Observe these moments, and later, at home, encourage your children to recall what made a big impression by revisiting the trip through photos or books.
Learn by playing around
The tactical, colorful aspects of art appeal to kids, often inspiring them to DIY their own masterpieces when they get home. Exploring their creativity helps children develop cognitively and physically.
Museums with please-touch exhibits and hands-on art projects “help kids make meaning,” says Sharon Shaffer, who served as the Director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Early Enrichment Center for 24 years. “Even if they don’t have the words, ask them questions to help further their thinking. Children see things that adults miss.”
(Check out the world’s most beautiful museums.)
At the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, children can whack helium-filled metallic balloons in the artist’s iconic “Floating Clouds” installation or learn rudimentary filmmaking techniques via the “Screen Test Machine.” Some galleries (e.g. the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Ohio’s Dayton Art Institute) offer gallery guides and other tools for young patrons; as the pandemic ebbs, museums including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., will again host drop-in art workshops for kids.
Parents can make museum trips more engaging for children by pre-picking artworks and even bringing small bag of props. “If you’re visiting a painting that shows a tightrope walker, put down a piece of string on the ground and let them try to imagine being high above a circus,” says Shaffer. If you’re not sure what’s on view that might appeal to children, ask at the front desk.
“Families shouldn’t feel shy about taking up space, making a bit of noise, and enjoying a visit on their terms,” says Grace Attlee, who runs educational programs at the kid-friendly House of Illustration in London, set to open in a new space in 2022. “Contrary to popular belief, most museums and galleries want little people in them.”
While it’s my impulse to direct my daughter’s attention towards pieces that enchant me, experts agree that parents shouldn’t try to control their kid’s museum visit. Ask them open and probing questions, but don’t demand answers. Says Shaffer, “Nobody likes a quiz. Interactions with art are all about quality, not quantity, something we can forget as adults.”
Think outside the gallery
Kids these days are digital natives, so they may be interested in seeing art on different terms. Exhibits that harness video and sound can provoke wonder in younger children.
Meow Wolf, an interactive art space in Santa Fe, New Mexico, ushers families into a music-, mystery-, and art-filled former bowling alley where they crawl through washing machines, dance on lights, and try to solve puzzles. The collective that founded it also has newer installations in Denver and Las Vegas.
(How art museums are adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic.)
The touring Van Gogh Immersive show uses virtual reality to turn the Impressionist painter’s wild colors and heavy brushstrokes into a trippy, high-tech extravaganza. Next year, cities including London and Washington, D.C., will host a similar video and virtual reality attraction, Mexican Geniuses, which recasts and reimagines the art of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.
These unconventional exhibits can reinforce the link in your kids brains between art and fun. “A lot of it is simply exposure,” says Shaffer. If your children aren’t around art, they can’t learn to enjoy it. “Whenever you go somewhere new, take advantage of what’s in the environment,” she says.
Appeal to their interests
Experts agree that playing to your child’s interests is another key to helping them enjoy art. My own kid loves the woods and mildly scary monsters. That’s why, this past summer, we ended up at the Coastal Maine Botanical Garden in Boothbay, with its rollicking display of large-scale wooden troll sculptures by Danish artist Thomas Dambo. “I make my art playful because I want it to speak to everybody,” he says. “I want to spread my message about taking care of nature.”
Dambo’s mediums—recycled wood and other “trash”—let him pack environmentalist ideas into delightful shapes. My toddler daughter isn’t old enough to get the point, though she did respond with joyful screams—and attempts to imitate the statues’ expressions—whenever she spotted a troll among the trees. In those moments, she was a dancer, an actor, and a patron of the arts.
It may be tempting to dismiss activities like troll hunting as child’s play, but Shaffer points out, these years of exploration are incredibly important. “Brain research has told us that 80 percent of the child’s personality, intellect, and skills develop in the first five years of life,” she says. “It’s the power of the brain to make sense of the world.”
Katy Kelleher is a Maine-based writer. Her work also appears in The Paris Review and Longreads. Follow her on Instagram or Twitter.
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Next up in our IGN First coverage of Eternal Strands, we’re diving into the unique and colorful art in the land of the Enclave. We sat down with art director Sebastien Primeau and lead character artist Stephanie Chafe to ask them all about it.
IGN: Let’s talk about Eternal Strands’ distinctive art style. What were some of the guiding principles behind the art direction?
Primeau: I think what was guiding the art direction at the beginning of the project was to find the scale of the game, because we knew that we were having those gigantic 25-meter tall creatures and monsters. So we really wanted to have the architectural elements of the game – the vegetation, the trees – to reflect that kind of size.
So one of my inspirations was coming from an architect called Hugh Ferriss, and I was very impressed by his work, and it was very inspiring for me too. So just the scale of his work. So he was a real influence for Metropolis, Gotham, so I was really inspired by his work.
Chafe: I think one of the things that, just as artists and as creators, we were interested in as well was going for a color palette that can be very bright. And something that can really challenge us too as artists, and going into a bit more of at-hand painterly work, and getting our hands really into it, into the clay, so to speak, and trying to go for something bright and colorful.
IGN: That’s not the first time I’ve heard your team describe the art style as “painterly.” What does that mean?
Primeau: Painterly is just a word that can give so much room to different types of interpretation. I think where we started was Impressionist painters. So I really enjoy looking at many painters, and they have different types of styles. But we wanted to have something that was fresh, colorful, and unique.
And also, I remember when we were starting the project there was that word. “It’s going to be stylized,” but stylized is just a word that gives so much room to different kinds of style. And since we were a small team, we had to figure out a way to create those rough brushstrokes. If it was painted very quickly by an artist, like Bob Ross would say, “Accident is normal.” So I think we wanted to embrace that. And because we’re all artists, it’s hard too, at some point, to disconnect from what you’re doing. It’s like, “Oh, I can maybe add some more details over there.” But I was always the- “Guys, oh, Steph, that’s enough. Let’s stop it right there. I think it looks cool.”
IGN: So, when you create an asset for Eternal Strands, is somebody actually painting something?
Chafe: I can speak more on the character side. For us, we do a lot of that hand painting, a lot of those strokes by hand. And we try to embrace, not the mistakes, but the non-realistic part of it having an extra splotch here and there.
We’ve got brushes that we made that can help us as artists to get the texture we’re looking for. It really is a texture that gives to it. But a lot of the time it’s not just something generated in a substance painter, or getting these things that will layer these things for you, making it quick and procedural. Sometimes we have those as helpers, but more often than not we just go in and paint.
IGN: Eternal Strands is a fair bit more colorful than lots of games today. Why was it important to the team to have lots of bright colors?
Primeau: You need to be careful, actually, with colors. Because with too many colors you can create that kind of pizza of color.
We wanted to balance the color per level, because we’re not making an open-world game. I really wanted each level to have their own color palette identity. So we’re playing a lot with the lighting. The lighting for me is key. It’s very important. You can have gorgeous textures, props, characters, but if your lighting is not that great, it’s like… So lighting is key. And especially with Unreal Five, we have now, access to Lumen. It brought so much richness to the color, how the color is balancing with the entirety of the level. It definitely changed the way we were looking at the game.
We’re using the technology, but in a way to create something that feels like if you were looking at a painting. I think we have achieved that goal.
Chafe: I’m very happy with it.
IGN: What were your inspirations from other games or other media when developing the art style?
Primeau: I have many. I’ll start with graphic novels, European graphic novels. I really wanted to stay away from DC comics, Marvels comics, those kinds of classics.
Before I started Eternal Strand, I saw a video. It was one of the League of Legends short films for a competition. It’s “RISE.” I don’t know if you remember that one, but it was made by Fortiche Studio who did Arcane, and I’m a huge fan of Arcane. When I saw that short film, it was way before Arcane was announced, I was like, “oh gosh, this is freaking cool. This is so amazing. I wish I would be able to work on a game that has that kind of look.”
Chafe: For me, when we started the project, one of the things that I wanted to challenge myself a lot was in concept and drawing and stuff like that and doing more, learning more about color as well, which is something I find super fascinating and also kicks my butt all the time because of just color theory in general.
But with the [character] portraits specifically, I think, I mean, growing up I played a lot of games, a lot of JRPGs too. I played just seeing basic portraits in something like Golden Sun or eventually also Persona and of course Hades, which is a fantastic game. I played way too much of that, early access included. But I really liked that part. Visual novels too, just that kind of thing. You can get an emotion from a 2D image as well when it’s well done, especially if you have voices on top of it.
IGN: Were there any really influential pieces of concept art that served as a guiding document the team would reference later on?
Chafe: I have one personal: It’s really Maxime Desmettre’s stuff because it was so saturated. Blue, blue, blue sky. Maxim Desmettre is our concept artist that we have who works from Korea. When I joined the project, seeing that was just like… and seeing that as a challenge too, like ‘how are we going to get there?’
The one that I’m thinking of that hopefully we could find after, just in general with the work that always speaks so much to me is this blue, blue sky and the saturation of the grass. But also when he gets into his architecture and stuff like that, there’s just a warmth to everything. The warmth to the stone that just makes it look inviting and mysterious at the same time. And I think that really speaks a lot to it.
IGN: How did you go about designing Eternal Strand’s protagonist: Brynn?
Primeau: I think that Mike also, when he pitched me the character, he was using Indiana Jones as an example. So courageous, adventurer guy, cool guy. Also, when you’re looking at Indiana Jones, he’s a cool guy. And we wanted to create that kind of coolness also out of our main protagonist. And I remember it took time. We did many iterations.
Chafe: It was a lot of iterations for sure. Well, I think I had done a bunch of sketches because it’s what’s going to be the face of the player, and also to have her own personality as well in the story, and her history as well. And the mantle was a really big one too. What gives her one of sets of her powers and stuff, figuring that out was actually one of the longest processes. It’s just a cape, but at the same time, it’s getting that to work with gameplay and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, all of Brynn’s personality and her vibe really comes from a lot of good work from the narrative team. So, mostly collaboration there.
IGN: What’s the deal with Brynn’s mentor: Oria? How did you settle on a giant bird?
Chafe: Populating the world of the enclave was, “it’s free real estate.” You get to just throw things on the wall and see what sticks. And, “Oh, that’s really cool. Oh, that’s nice.” At some point I’d done a big sketch of a big bird lady with a claymore, and Seb said, “That’s cool.” And then kind of ran with it.
IGN: What’s the toughest part about the art style you’ve chosen for Eternal Strands?
Primeau: The toughest part was…A lot of people in the team have experience making games, so it was to get outside of that mold that we’ve been to.
For me, working on games that were more realistic in terms of look, I think it was really tough just to think differently, to change our mindset, especially that we knew that we would be a small team, so we had to do the art differently, find recipes, especially when we were talking about textures, for example. So having a good mix.
Chafe: One of the things too is also as we’re all a bunch of artists, and every artist has their own style that they just suddenly have ingrained in them, and that’s what makes us all unique as artists as well. But when you’re on a project, you have to coalesce together. You can’t kind of have one look different from the other. When you’re doing something more realistic, you have your North Star, which is a giant load of references that are real. And you can say “it has to look like that, as close to that as possible.”
When you have a style in mind and you’re developing at the same time, you kind of look at it and you review it and you have a feeling more than anything else.
You’re training each other with your styles as you kind of merge together in the end. And that kind of is how the style happened through, like you mentioned, like finding easy recipes, through just actually creating assets and seeing what comes out and, “Oh, that’s really cool. Okay, we can now use that as kind of our North Star.”
For more on Eternal Strands, check out our preview of the Ark of the Forge boss fight, or read our interview with the founders of Yellow Brick Games on going from AAA studios to their own indie shop, and for everything else stick with IGN.
Saanich police are investigating the theft of a large collection of First Nations art valued at more than $60,000 from a Gordon Head home.
The theft happened on April 2.
The collection includes several pieces by Whitehorse-based artist Calvin Morberg, as well as Inuit carvings estimated to be more than 60 years old.
Anyone with information on the thef is asked to call Saanich police at 250-472-4321.
jbell@timescolonist.com
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