Teaching Teenagers: Ville de Trois-Rivieres

Nov 15th, 2008.
I was asked in the beginning of August to teach a group of teenagers in Trois-Rivieres in the fall. Festi-Art was a creation of high school teachers at Le Tremplin Ecole Secondaire & the surrounding schools. The festival of workshops covered the arts, music, comedy, sound engineering and more. I was asked to teach because of the diversity, style & quality of my work. Needless to say, I was very flattered to be asked.



This would have been my first workshop teaching teenagers. The workshop taught artistic face painting to students from several schools in the area. Festi-Art is program that used to run four years ago but had stopped; now they are trying to relaunch the program as of last year. Unfortunately this year many of the workshops got canceled because of low registration; but of the workshops that got filled, my own class "Artistique Maquillage " was quite a hit with a total of 16 students in my class.

The workshop I taught covered the basic fundamentals of getting into doing artistic face painting as a job. We went through many looks, first teaching a stylish cyborg, then we went into doing butterflies, tiger faces, skeletons and then finished up with teaching them about how to do my own personal style of artistry which is influenced by high fashion make-up.

By teaching the teenagers the basics involved in doing face painting, it was then easier to turn around and to try to teach them how to work conceptually, which is how I work. A client or myself, will give me a concept to expand into art, be it on the body or the canvas. My clients expect to see quality results. So I was trying to teach the students how to develop that ability within themselves.

It was a super positive day, the students and the teachers were happy and when class was over. The students didn't want to quit. Which is quite a compliment! The other teachers offered to keep an eye on the students; so when I left, the teenagers were still painting and practicing on each other!

- April-Anna Bremers
The Art of April-Anna
http://www.aprilanna.com