Now THAT’S how you run an Art Camp

I recently had the pleasure of attending the Indiana Wesleyan University (IWU) Art + Design department’s second consecutive Academic Summer Camp. It is part of a larger collective of Academic camps that the school hosts including nursing, engineering, musical theater, and even urban farming. The 2022 art camp had seven campers, and was a blast, as it’s where my knife vest came to be. The summer of 2023 there were 24 campers. Was it any less of a blast? Absolutely not. Am I glad I had prior experience with the school, the profs, and even a couple other campers in a more tame environment? Extremely.

Now how do you host an “art” camp? Are group projects the answer? Is it a large collection of demos by various artists? How do you get the students to soak in all the strategies in such a short time?
I feel the IWU Art + Design department has the process down beautifully.

They begin with the standard tour of the department on the first day, as the camps are required and suggested to do. The second day is when it begins: starting with two or three back-to-back workshops demonstrating various fundamental art concepts at a collegiate level, segwaying into a prompt. The prompt is broad, but simple. This year’s prompt was a chair. How simple can you make a chair? The answer is quite. Presenting: the log. It’s a chair. You can sit on it. But who wants their chair to be that boring? Using the newly found (or freshly presented) knowledge of shape and form, the 24 campers were tasked with conceptualizing a chair that is more than the fundamental four legs, seat and a back.
The ideas that came forth were so varied yet so similar. Students flocked to nature, making mushroom stools, a sunflower cushion, a leaf-inspired seat, a spider web lounge, and even a roly-poly chair. Students made chairs out of cardboard books, into a viking throne, and an imposing snake. The variance of the ideas was present, and yet the concept was still closed-ended.
The year prior (2022) the prompt was “wearables” (as in you make something you can wear). Very broad. Yet specific. 2023’s was even more specific but somehow more broad. And that wasn’t all.

Any art professor understands their craft is to be taught over the course of weeks, if not months, after being learned for years, if not decades. The IWU profs are no exceptions. However, the art camp is four and a half days long, broken into nine 3-hour sessions. They don’t have weeks. So they warn the students about the overload of information and teach the fundamentals of graphic design in two hours as opposed to the week in which a college student would typically spend just familiarizing themselves with the program. Oh but also illustration… and sculpture… and photography.
The professors blend the proficiencies together seamlessly. That chair we designed? Used in the photography and incorporated in the lesson about photography lighting tools and strategies. The illustration and character design section? Used to conceptualize a character to sit in the chair we designed. The graphic design portion? Used to create a poster advertising our chair and/or character.
All the while the profs were interspersing just the right amount of student and prof-led demos demonstrating Procreate, Character design, Style, and Skecthbooking, among other things, between loosely individual studio time that could be used to collaborate or focus while creating.

It all flowed together. It wasn’t some imalgamation of different concepts and unrelated projects. It was comprehensive and related into two very clear larger projects. Yes there were process sketches and unused photos prior to the final results. But that is a hugely unrecognized part of art. For a final piece to be presented can mean dozens of undetailed or detailed sketches and ideas leading up to the creation of that final piece. The ideation process is hardly represented in mainstream media art. We were reminded of the story of how the character “Boss Baby” came to be. A simple sketch that sat ruminating on a bulletin board for years before it became the animated film and huge success it is today. Major motion pictures originated in napking sketches. The sketches show how an artist thinks, the final pieces just show what they can do.

If you already knew about the concepts like form and shape, or already knew how to use Procreate, InDesign, and Photoshop, fantastic. That just meant you could dive deeper and pick out the more minute details in each of the lessons that someone learning it for the first time is unable to decipher.

And that’s why I’m thrilled for next summer already.