Funky abstraction and expansive landscapes

7 June 2019

Well done to The Maryhill HUB team for organising their vibrant community art exhibition. Here are some images from the North United Communities artworks display…🙂⛺️🏔🌇🖌🎨🖼

Photos courtesy of The Maryhill HUB

Category: Art Groups Tags: Community Groups, NUC, Young people's art

Spring experiments and lots of tensho!

16 March 2019

The primary school group on Saturday at North United Communities in Maryhill Hub tried Japanese calligraphy for the first time and had lots of fun!

To begin with we did some short meditation together, just grounding and breathing, settling, and then touching the materials which everyone enjoyed. Then we poured the sumi ink and straight away they were making marks with the fude brushes and engaging with the pictorial aspects of the characters, and the shapes of the strokes.

They were especially keen to try the tensho and kinbun styles of characters, and we chatted about the meanings behind these and how they related to our experience of being connected to nature. There was a fair bit of experimentation in this group with the children exploring the dense quality of the ink and also the hanshi paper which was is a lot thinner they are used to. 

明 akarui – bright was a nice kanji that was enjoyed, and also 春 haru – spring – and dai 大 – great – with other kanji also being worked on. The meanings and rich visual language of each character was quickly absorbed by the young people.

Kindly supported by The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation

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Workshop for North United Communities

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Category: Art Groups Tags: Community Groups, NUC, Sasakawa Foundation, Shodo calligraphy, Young people's art

Clouds and heart-mind at Maryhill Hub

15 March 2019

Secondary school young people at the Friday night North United Communities group embraced Japanese writing and Shodo calligraphy. The group had some meditative time first to feel the textures and weight of the materials, such as the types of fude brushes, suzuri ink well and bunchin paper weight, and to settle and breathe deeply, before beginning.

Kumo 雲 – cloud – was especially popular in the kaisho style. And with a few participants being anime fans such as of Natsu Dragneel, so we worked on natsu 夏- summer – as well as a bonus!

Some young people also enjoyed working on kokoro 心 – heart or mind. One young participant even worked on the hiragana syllabary which was fantastic and we explored some of the pronunciation of these as well as the kanji characters.

Kindly supported by The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation

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Workshop for North United Communities

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Category: Art Groups Tags: Community Groups, NUC, Sasakawa Foundation, Shodo calligraphy, Young people's art

Shodo calligraphy at Ruchill Community Centre

14 March 2019

We started with some discussion about the styles and type of imagery, and just a little about the history! Then after some demonstration, we worked from tsuki 月, moon, and hi 日, sun or day. The young people really engaged with the peaceful and attentive way of working, and with the tensho and kaisho styles, and surprisingly told us it was so easy! They wanted more kanji to work from 🙂

Next we worked on mountains and water, or landscape, sansui 山水, a nice simple word with two characters. Then ai 愛, love, and onto dai 大, great or large, which has a lovely balance and contrast between the type of brushstrokes. No problem for the Ruchill young folk! 

We then worked on each person’s name in the katakana syllabary, which we encouraged them to add to some of their pieces, or just try it on a single sheet of paper.　

Kindly supported by The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation

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Workshop for North United Communities

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Category: Art Groups Tags: Community Groups, NUC, Sasakawa Foundation, Shodo calligraphy, Young people's art

Sights of Glasgow painted at NUC Breakfast Club

2 March 2019

We started off sketching the main shapes of the composition – of the Clyde river and Hydro, Armadillo and Tall Ship, then added the great Glasgow icon of the Duke of Wellington with his stunning traffic cone hat 🤠 Next the Squinty bridge, Finnieston Crane, some flats and the Riverside Museum. The young folk were keen on an Irn Bru bottle being included too! We had a flurry of energetic painting and have about half still to work on soon. 🎨

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Workshop for North United Communities

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Category: Art Groups Tags: Community Groups, NUC, Young people's art

Meditation and Qigong with young people

10 February 2019

At Maryhill Hub on Saturday, Blair working with the NUC young people – a short session of mindfulness meditation for children with some fun Qigong moves😃

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Workshop for North United Communities

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Category: Art Groups Tags: Community Groups, Meditation, NUC

Season’s Greetings ❄⛄🎄

23 December 2018

The Drawing and Painting Studio wishes you a peaceful and relaxing festive holiday!

Thanks for all your support and creative energy in 2018.

Merry Christmas banner by North United Communities kids group!

Category: News Tags: NUC, Young people's art

Watch a leaf fall

6 October 2018

We said goodbye to the brightness of summer and welcomed the autumn breeze and smells and darker nights, with some leafy artworks.

The children really engage with the textures and colours of the autumnal leaves, the variety of shapes and types of leaves and different hues.

The leaves could be used as stencils or stuck down to complement the drawing and words.

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Workshop for North United Communities

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Category: Art Groups Tags: Community Groups, NUC, Young people's art

A chicken dragon and other lively sketches at Ruchill

5 October 2018

In this group at Ruchill Community Centre different tasks were tried out by the young people.

Influenced by anime and manga, dragons were popular, such as the Story of the Small Girl and the Dragon, and imagery from Princess Mononoke, a classic film from the Japanese animation Studio Ghibli.

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Workshop for North United Communities

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Category: Art Groups Tags: Community Groups, NUC, Young people's art

Summery art groups – patterns, colour and lucky laugh!

8 September 2018

There were varied NUC summer art and craft sessions in Maryhill, Ruchill and Milton with young people and adults, they were fun groups inspired by a few different themes and using ways of working that were enjoyable while learning new methods.

There was a large banner with ‘Summer Sunshine’ drawn with pens, with a funky lizard carefully added in, plus hand stencil drawing using the hand shape as a composition for decorative patterns worked into the finger and palm shapes..

The lucky laugh game we played was really light hearted, with the kids closing their eyes while moving cut outs of facial features onto their head shape they had drawn – other children guiding them to the best, or worst!, spot to be stuck down. It was a nice way for them to make some quirky portraits while working with each other 🙂

Category: Art Groups Tags: Community Groups, NUC, Young people's art