Life Stories: One Story A Beginning

Adult cicada  Wikipedia: Public Domain

Growing up on an old farm outside of Washington DC, I had access to 40 acres of fields, barns and woods. It was a time when kids wandered and explored for hours a day, especially in the summer. 

Kid Friendly Sea-Saving Art

Get to the Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington, D.C. by September 5th if you can. You won't be sorry.

As an artist I am drawn to beauty and I am good at mimicking it. However, I have the most profound respect for those artists who create beautiful work and pull together diverse threads of universal themes...and in this case make it an excellent educational experience for kids. I love this work. I love the idea, the colors and the venue.

Parrotfish, Washed Ashore

Seventeen sculptures of marine life created by Washed Ashore.org have been on exhibit at the zoo since May 27, 2016 (and leaving September 5th). Washed Ashore is a nonprofit dedicated to creating an awareness of marine debris and plastic pollution through art. The sculptures on exhibit were created from plastic garbage that washed up on a 300 mile stretch of west coast beaches. Eighteen tons of debris was collected by thousands of volunteers. These volunteers not only clean the beaches of debris. The materials they collect are sorted and  turned into art.

Prints for Kids

Like many artists, I started drawing as a kid. I remember copying comic strip characters and asking my Mom to help me draw a horse. I am very fond of this photo of painting in our yard as a four year old. I was lucky my Mom indulged me, I'm quite sure I made a big mess.

I am a big fan of keeping that four year old mentality as much as I can.

Lady Bug

Wish On A Dandelion

Take Young Kids to the Art Museum...Virtually

As a parent or educator, do you want to introduce the children in your life to fascinating objects that tell stories? Even better, have them be great objects of art from a wide variety of times and places? What about getting the kids to tell you the stories they see in the objects/images? Art museums can be amazing resources for just these kinds of activities.There are also some good apps to help out if you don't have time to peruse the museum websites.

Wine Vessel (Zun) in the Form of a Goose, 206 B.C.E.-220 C.E. Bronze, Brooklyn Museum,  Creative Commons-BY

Is it just me? I love this goose. It brings out the 5 year old in me instantly. Would you like to have this goose as a pet? I have found animals a great link to communicating with children, they have so much appeal. Of course, animals have been subjects of art from the earliest days...since cave paintings. The Brooklyn Museum is a fabulous resource.

Kids also love to see other children. I grew up with a reproduction of Renoir's Girl With A Watering Can in my house. She is so endearing, what is she about the run off and do? What story would she tell about her day? This painting is in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, another great on line resource.

Auguste Renoir A Girl with a Watering Can, 1876, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art

Anyone want to try this mode of transportation? What would your kids say? I am especially interested in non-western art. So much to investigate and learn from the images. This bowl is in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum.

Bowl Depicting Bahram Gur and Azada, late 12th - early 13th century Ceramic Brooklyn Museum        Creative Commons-BY

How can you connect children with images of art objects....without leaving your home or school? These images and many, many more are available for viewing or download at the art museums who have made various of their resources accessible because they are either in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions. Of course you don't need to go to only those resources that have open access images.  My absolute favorites are the Brooklyn Museum, LA County Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Getty Museum and the Portland Art Museum. 
 
However, not everyone has time to peruse the museum websites looking for images to engage kids with great art, right? What are some of the other ways to do this for your kids/students? There are some great apps out there that offer alternatives.

MOMA Art Lab

MOMA Art Lab allows users to build art with geometric shapes and a number of activities that are based on specific works of art from their collection.

MOMA's Art Lab app

ArtLab activities tied to specific artist's work

Large images, like this one of an Alexander Calder sculpture accompany the various activities.

Let's build a mobile.

PlayART Van Gogh 

 PlayART Van Gogh takes objects from a number of Van Gogh paintings and lets the user rearrange to make their own creations.They can then be saved and shared.

PlayART Van Gogh home

Images from the bottom are dragged up to make an original creation from Van Gogh's work

Duck Takes A Ride: An Art Story

My company, Kristin Harris Design, recently released this interactive, animated narrative that is illustrated with ancient sculpture of animals from China and Egypt that are in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Portland Art Museum and LACMA. This is a app designed to introduce young children to a variety of art objects woven together in story format. I am thrilled to bring this sculpture to the attention of families who may not be familiar with it.

 

ABC.DC: An Art Alphabet

Our next app, soon to be released, is an interactive, animated  ABC book with images from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.  This is an art museum I grew up visiting and it's been so much fun exploring the 20,000 images they have put into the public domain and finding the best kid friendly images to put together in this animated, interactive ABC app.

Soon to be released iPad app

Each image is interactive and animated, here the horse rocks back and forth.

This etching of boys at the park has added animation of a dragon kite.

Art Swipe

Art Swipe is based on the concept of exquisite corpse from the Surrealists. Images are layered in thirds and swiped by the viewer to rearrange. The designer made very clever choices, including many faces, that work together to make both entertaining and humorous combinations.  Images can be viewed in their entirety with all of the pertinent information. The viewer can also add different artwork from the museum's collection or even from their own photo gallery. Combinations can be saved to the photo gallery or shared.

 

What are your favorite way to take your kids on a virtual museum visit?

Art To Tell Stories and More

I am heading off to NYC in a few days.  My trips to New York has been exciting and formative over the years. In my family, it was the tradition that our father took us on a short trip to NYC when we were 10 years old.  I am especially anticipating this visit because I have two destinations that tie directly into my current app development; the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

• China, Wine Vessel (Zun) in the Form of a Goose, 206 B.C.E.-220 C.E. Bronze, 11 1/2 x 6 3/16 x 17 1/2 in. (29.2 x 15.7 x 44.5 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum photograph

Recently I discovered that the Brooklyn Museum has made available for download and use many images from their collection. These images are available with a Creative Commons-BY license. This means I am free to adapt their images and share them with this license as long as I credit the museum. What a boon to media developers.  Congratulations to the Brooklyn Museum and other institutions who are doing the same.  The Portland  Art Museum is another resource I am tapping for this project. Both the Brooklyn Museum and the Portland Art Museum have extensive collections of ancient Chinese and ancient Egyptian art.

China, Eastern Han period (25–220 CE),earthenware
The Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Collection of Early Chinese Art, Portland Art Museum

Since my trip to China in 2011, I have intensified my study of Chinese art history.  The Asian Art Museum (in San Francisco) has a very extensive offering of art history lectures on iTunesU.  At one point I realized I had watched over 45 hours of lectures about Chinese art history focusing on the Shang, Zhou, Qin and Han dynasties. I am fascinated by the early bronze sculpture and especially intrigued at how accessible they are for children. There are so many animal objects that reflect not only a realism and love of the creatures, but are humorous and delightfully entertaining. Case in point is the goose at the top of this article and the hedgehog below. It does add to the mystic for me that these objects were made over two thousand years ago.

Egypt, Hedgehog, ca. 1938-1700 B.C.E. Faience, 1 5/8 x 1 5/8 x 2 13/16 in. (4.2 x 4.1 x 7.1 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 65.2.1. Creative Commons-BY

My project, which is designed for very young children, involves finding a selection of these animals and bringing them together in a story with animated components that bring the animals to life. I am working with sculpture from ancient China and ancient Egypt. Why these objects for this age group?  I am a great believer in introducing children to artwork from around the world to better understand of our shared history, our shared human experience.  I am also a great believer in starting this process as early as possible.

ABC Egyptian Art from The Brooklyn Museum of Art

The first book I bought for my daughter when she was a baby, ironically, was the ABC Egyptian Art from The Brooklyn Musueum. I was surprised to discover that it is still in print, originally published in April of 1988, a few months after she was born. 

I am making connections with the Education Departments at these museum to brainstorm about how to add to their efforts to make their collection available to children everywhere, regardless of whether they can come to the museum in person or not. As an educator and artist living in a small community in Central VA (after years in the DC area) I seek out those arts institutions that are invested in making their collections and exhibitions available online.  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, another greatly anticipated destination this trip, has innumerable online resources for accessing their collection. Their new series 82nd & Fifth is a collection of short videos of artwork selected by curators to document work that has been significant to them. There are currently 16 in the series building to a total of 100. While at the Met I will be spending a lot of time in their Chinese galleries. 

I will also visit the MoMA Art Lab.  Not directly related to my current project, but I am looking forward to meeting Cari Frisch at the Sandbox Summit in April and would love to drop in and say hey while I am there.  I am a huge fan of MoMA's online presence. Their exhibition On Line with this virtual component has been a part of my college level drawing curriculum for a few years.


I am finding a robust and diverse collection of objects to incorporate into stories that introduce young children to artistic expression that has been a part of the human experience for thousands of years. This makes me very happy.  I am looking forward to sharing these stories soon.

Wild About WWF Together

Why do I love this app so much?  Is it that I was just at the National Zoo in Washington, DC and watched pandas eating bamboo in the Panda House?  Is it because everyone loves animals? Is it because it is engaging for both kids and adults? Or just that WWF Together is one of the most beautifully designed, clever apps I have seen for the iPad?

The World Wildlife Fund just released their first US iPad app, WWF Together.  It is free and available for download.  Together features endangered animals that WWF works to protect, including giant pandas, marine turtles, tigers, bison, polar bears, snow leopards, whales and elephants. More species are to be added.

When an animal is selected, you are greeted with a large portrait and text that describes a prominent characteristic of the animal. The sections are based on the mobile magazine model of accessing pages vertically and  horizontally. A grid is superimposed on the screen at touch to diagram the options.  It is usually two or three pages vertically and 3 or 4 pages horizontally.  As you move around the app, you get visual cues as to where you are. Each animal has a fact sheet with population numbers in the wild, habitat, weight, height, distance from your location (when location is enabled) and a cute revolving 3D model of the globe that shows were the animal lives in the wild.

Have I raved about the photographs and video clips yet?  They are so compelling.  WWF obviously works with some of the best photographers in the world to get such intimate portraits that tug at our hearts and minds. I am watching a panda eating bamboo right now in one of the video segments.

A design element or rather a concept element that ties this app together is origami.  This is so brilliant. Origami appeals to kids and adults alike. At the end of each animal section you are prompted to go to instructions about how to make the animal by folding paper. You see an animation of a piece of paper folding into the specific animal you have just learned about through text and images. There is a link to instructions for the origami as well as links to share on Facebook, Twitter or to email a friend.  I suspect these links will be used often and play a major role in how effective this app is to advance their mission helping save endangered species. WWF has truly integrated this app with social media and their message.

All of these features are presented in a document that is designed for clarity and accessibility. The photo galleries have the standard icon of an i in a circle to indicate additional information.  The succinct text is placed over the image in white full caps to insure it can be read.  Any extraneous design elements are not frills but used to support clarity and access to information.  It is a beautiful example of a well designed document.

I am really looking forward to sharing this new find with my iPad buddies of all ages.