Project. To design a poster for the “Children’s Carnival, Patras 2006."

Purpose. To introduce the graphic arts to children 6 to 13 through their own personal creations.

Assignment. Patras is known throughout Greece and the world for its Carnival. A form of folk expression bearing a close relationship to the visual arts. The town spends the whole year preparing for this celebration. Within the context of this event, children have their own separate form of participation. This year the Visual Arts Workshop has proposed that the poster for Children’s Carnival be designed by the children themselves. The children have all worked on this under the guidance of their teachers. At the end, a work will be chosen and printed as the poster of the year and put up throughout the town.
Each of our exercises is based on the following focal points: Sentimental Attachments, Artistic Instruction, and Research.

Sentimental Atachments
This consists of the relationship the child has with the subject and the emotion that is developed for it. It is obvious that the specific subject, focused on the joy and the entertainment to be derived from color and disguise, is something the children experience each year during Carnival in both the town and their families. Furthermore, many images of this experience remain in their memories.

Artistic Instruction
Each work of visual art can be distinguished for its color, design, texture, volume and composition. A poster contains all of the above, except volume. Thus the children are guided by the teacher to discover for themselves how a color changes by means of its surroundings and how the shapes contribute to that. In short, they are introduced to the dialogue between shape and color. They are encouraged then to find out for themselves that letters are shapes before they are letters and can have the color inside them or outside (negative - positive).

This is then developed by a special exercise. The role played by the poster and its utility is also explained to them until they feel compelled to try and produce the proper figure. For the older children this exercise is done with cut-up pieces of paper (collage); the positions can thus be changed many times and various relationships of shape and color experimented with, before the final composition is settled on.

Research
For the concepts of shape and color we made use of, in a simplified form, images from the books by Johannes Itten and Josef Albers. Before we started working on them we spent a good deal of time looking at various posters from the Russian Avant Garde and Dada, without in the process neglecting contemporary posters. We believe that in order for the imagination to be fully mobilized it must be nourished by quality stimuli from each subject. Afterward, the books are closed and we start to work.

Format. 20 X 28 inches (50 x 70 cm)

Time. Two hours a week for six weeks

Cleopatra Dinga was born in Athens, Greece, in 1945. She studied painting and set design at the Athens School of Fine Arts under Yannis Moralis and Vasilis Vasileiadis on a scholarship from the Greek State Scholarship Foundation. On a scholarship she continued her studies for an additional five years in Paris at the Ecole Suprieure De Beaux-Arts and the Ecole Suprieure Des Arts Decoratifs. She exhibited with the Jeune Peinture group and served as an assistant to the set designer Uber Monloup in productions at the T.N.P. Theatres, Villeurbanne, Commedie Francaise, Sarah Bernand, the Odeon and so forth.

Cleopatra has had many solo and group exhibitions. She has done sets for the National Theatre, the State Theatre of Northern Greece, the Free Theatre, and regional theatres along with Greek and foreign films and television. She served as the coordinator for the National Committee for the Visual Arts of the Ministry of Culture and worked at the Ziridis Schools from 1979 to October 2002 as Director of Visual Arts.
In 2000 she began to organize and direct the Visual Arts Workshop of the Municipality of Patras which is a part of the Network of Visual Arts Workshops of the Ministry of Culture.

Anthi Tomara was born in Patras, Greece, and studied drawing, painting, engraving and the bookmaker's craft at the Athens School of Fine Arts. She has worked in the secondary educational system from 1977 to the present and at the Visual Arts Workshop of the Municipality of Patras from 2000 to 2005. Anthi has had three solo exhibitions in Athens and Patras and has taken part in many group exhibitions in both Greece and abroad.

Irini Bratti was born in Patras, Greece, in 1963 and studied political science and sociology at the University of Athens and Education at the University of Patras. She studied painting in Germany where she lived until 2000. Irini has exhibited her work in many European countries, but primarily in Germany and Greece. She lived in Patras since 2001 and works as a teacher at the Visual Arts Workshop of the Municipality of Patras.

Anna Kotsou was born in Athens, Greece, in 1970 and studied sculpture at the Athens School of Fine Arts under Th. Papayannis. She graduated with distinction on scholarships from the Greek State Scholarship Foundation. Anna studied Graphic Arts and Industrial Design at the Vakalo School. She worked as a Professor of Art in the Greek secondary school system.From 2000 to May 2005 worked at the Visual Arts Workshop of the Municipality of Patras.

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