What's inside an artist's head?

Ever wondered what goes on in the head of an artist? 

We have been inspired to explore this idea by Ed Vere's wonderful picture book The Artist.

The Artist in the story has a head full of ideas and images. This is her world and helps her to create her art.

We began a conversation in Autahi about what we enjoy thinking about and what fills up our heads. Talk became some writing, and then drawing. We asked our artists to draw each idea on a separate piece of paper. It was fascinating to see what each person drew, from diggers and police dogs to butterflies, unicorns, friends and family.

They painted each drawing carefully with water colours. When the paint was dry, we outlined some bold details in Sharpie before bubble-cutting each picture.

Each artist collected between six and ten ideas so we had lots and lots of small works of art on the go.

Taking inspiration from The Artist, we made a large silhouette of each person's head by using a torch to project their shadow onto a wall. This may have been the trickiest part of the process: everyone had to keep very still so that their shadows could be drawn onto black paper.

We placed all of the small artworks inside the our silhouette heads. The finishing touches were to create colourful backgrounds to frame our 'heads' and contrast with the black, as well as a few decorations in oil pastel.

Here is a little taster of our finished art.

This art piece took us many weeks to complete and we are very proud of how it turned out. Drop by Autahi and visit our gallery for more glimpses of what goes on in the heads of our Autahi artists.