Art in Motion

Any work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, and so, in the manner of art making, the process is something like conjuring a breath, capturing the motion of a river or the way wind blows through a tree branch. With careful consideration to the formal elements of a painting, each brushstroke becomes a significant part of the world. 

Our 1st Grade students, with guidance from Lower School Art Teacher Lisa Anderson, have been participating in this practice of world making, primarily through landscape paintings. Thinking about the technical elements of foreground and background, depth and horizon lines, texture and tone, students began creating pastoral scenes of autumn. 

“The intention of the landscape paintings were to get students to think about space and how to create the illusion of depth and distance,” explains Mrs. Anderson. “Students had to think about foreground, middleground and background as well as the mixture of primary and secondary colors to create visual texture.” 

To add an additional element to the textured reality of the students’ paintings, Mrs. Anderson collaborated with Melanie Gregory, Lower School Instructional Technology Integrator, to animate the paintings. Using Motionleap, an application that allows artists to animate elements of paintings, students were able elevate their creations. 

The pieces were then uploaded to Motionleap, which allows students to choose the features in the painting they would like to enliven with motion. A river cutting through a mountainside, for example, can be given an undulant current, and the trees dotting the foreground can shake from a gust of wind. 

Heather Bruneau, who intends to integrate Motionleap into her own projects with students, says that having to consider the deeper life of a painting in the animation process makes the students connect more with their work. “The program reinforces concepts in their art while also adding another asset to their piece,” she says. “Students are doing that conceptual investigation of their own artworks about what each feature of the piece means, and that makes it more meaningful.”

The project, then, becomes a union of art and technology. “I think this is the perfect way to incorporate technology,” Mrs. Anderson says, “because when you have a student that has just learned all these concepts, and now you ask them to add animation to it — it enhances the piece, making it come alive.”