This week at Camp ROGA, we dipped our brushes into imagination and painted the town every color of the rainbow for Artful Antics week! This week was all about letting campers dye the world in their own color, whether it be athletic accomplishments or ambitious creative pursuits. From sculpting masterpieces and curating their own galleries to experimenting like modern-day Picassos and getting gloriously messy with Jackson Pollock-style splatters, campers explored every corner of their creativity. So roll up your sleeves and step into the studio, your inner artist is waiting at Camp ROGA: Artful Antics!
To get campers in the artful mood, we led them through an activity that blends their creativity with their athleticism: Paintbrush! The game is played as follows: one set of campers becomes the colors within an artist’s palette and stands at the edge of a boundary, usually a line on either the rec or team floor. Then one camper becomes the artist and calls on the colors as their muse demands. Whenever a color is called, any camper wearing that color has to immediately run across the painting (the floor). The artist then tries their best to stop the colors where they want them on the painting, struggling against the chaos and limitations of their tools. Any colors caught would become part of the painting, working with the artist to complete their masterpiece, and catching other colors to give the paintings even more vibrant shades. We, of course, repeated this process with other artists and other colors, ensuring that we had a veritable gallery filled out by the end.
An important principle in both art and gymnastics is balance. Much like how an artist must carefully balance what they put on a canvas, a gymnast must balance his or her weight atop high points and structures. We decided to combine both ideas. For our gymnastics practice on the beam, we would call out different poses randomly while we had campers each walk across the beam. When they heard a pose, campers would freeze atop the beam and hold the position for as long as they could. As all of our beams are right next to each other, this made a pretty portrait of a line of posing campers, each in perfect picturesque balance with each other. Imagine an artist using a brushstroke to express emotion, or a dancer using their body to tell a story. Gymnasts do exactly the same. Every jump, flip, or routine tells a story about the gymnast’s journey with their athleticism—how much they can do now, how much they have improved, and how much more they can envision for the future. Also important to art is rhythm, and we have plenty of that. In women’s gymnastics competitions, when athletes perform their floor routines, they have accompanying music to match the vibe and rhythm of their routines. We decided to bring that to camp this week during our floor exercises. Different groups of students would perform tricks like forward and backward rolls and front flips while different music played in the background for each of them. Each camper would have a unique track assigned to them that they could perform and be proud of.
Leaving behind the gymnastics for a moment, the campers got to perform some more literal art. One thing campers were really excited for was the tie-dyeing day. While other pieces of art go great as decorations or toys, this week’s tie-dye bags could be used in everyday life. Whether they be books for school or extra clothes for an upcoming water day, the tie-dye bag has got you covered. Everybody loves tie-dye day! Much like previous weeks, campers could still do whatever wacky types of ties they wanted (and we saw some wacky ones), campers who wanted to know what their design would look like beforehand, and design accordingly, had the previous weeks’ experience to draw from.
The kaleidoscope craft allowed campers to view life through an artistic lens. This craft involved using a tube, beads, and a set of mirrors to make a rotating rainbow of colors. Campers could choose what colors they wanted to decorate their kaleidoscope with and what colors they wanted to add to the swirling effect inside.
Exploring the motif of wind, our young artists got to experiment with how the wind affected their projects. This week, campers had two different crafts that used the wind to function: a miniature windmill and a folding fan. Art has a long history of using wind to represent freedom and creativity, and part of that history is making art that reacts to the wind, making art that constantly changes shape and rhythm. These crafts do both; the windmills react to either the breeze or just breath, and can be made to make many different kinds of rhythms and illusory shapes. The folding fan can be folded into different shapes and can be made to compel the wind, as the artist pleases (and while it can be used to power the windmill, it is not very effective, as some campers discovered). And both, of course, may be colored to whatever the young artists’ preference.
Creativity requires power to run, and Camp ROGA has the best kind of fuel. This week, we offered a variety of healthy snacks to power up our campers’ muses, including Banana Brushes—bananas covered in sprinkles and placed on popsicle sticks—and Rainbow Bright Skewers, which featured a colorful assortment of fresh fruit. Also on the menu were Butterfly Rice Cakes—rice cakes topped with oranges and blueberries arranged to look like butterflies. These fun and colorful treats gave our artists a boost of inspiration to keep creating and get back out there!
No artist’s repertoire is complete without some watercolors—and we had plenty of water to go with our color! During this week’s Water Day, our young artists took their creativity to the ROGA lawn as they transformed each other into living canvases for watercolor bombs. The yard became a playful battleground, with campers competing to see whose colors could cover the most surface area. They tossed watercolor bombs, poured buckets of paint-infused water, and even used rafts as oversized paintbrushes on the slip-and-slide canvas. The fluid beauty of water met the limitless imagination of our artists in the most vibrant way.
With their muses momentarily at rest, our artists headed home with heads full of new techniques, themes, and inspiration from the week. While the art may pause for now, the fun definitely doesn’t. Join us next week as we dive into the thrilling world of Camp ROGA: Secret Agent week!