Incinerator Gallery - Social Justice Art for Teens

Social Justice Art for Teens – July

Welcome to Social Justice Art for Teens Online – where the Incinerator Gallery comes to you.

Our artist educator Francine Sculli invites you to join along with these creative activities from the comfort of your own home. Please take a a photo of your artworks, share your favourite social justice artist and artworks or ask your questions.

Please join Incinerator Social Justice Art for Teens closed group on Facebook to be inspired and get connected with other young artists wanting to have their voices heard. Use your art to raise awareness and make a difference.

Use the hashtag #IncineratorGallery so everyone can share and support each other, just as we do during the program at Incinerator Gallery.

Drawing Challenge

This month we will be exploring a classic drawing challenge with a social justice twist and a two-fold outcome.

Firstly, daily drawing challenges are a great way to stretch yourself and your artistic thinking. Having the restraints of a prompt can give you something to ground your drawing in and eliminate the fear we sometimes have on not knowing what to make our art about. Prompts are also a great way to develop your personal thoughts and opinions, and develop your artistic voice, as you think about your own personal connections to the prompts. Not to mention the skill-based fact that drawing every day helps you to improve your technique.

The second great outcome from this drawing challenge is that it’ll help you build an understanding of key social justice vocabulary. This is important for many reasons, but perhaps the most pertinent of all is that knowing these words and building a deeper understanding of them helps to also build our knowledge on Social Justice, and as artists, that knowledge gives us power to create art works that can make a difference.

As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said:

The limits of my language are the limits of my universe.

The more we build our language around social justice, the more our universe and possibility to ignite change can expand too.

There is a drawing prompt for each day this month. Each prompt is an important word connected to Social Justice, whether it be a social injustice or a concept that helps promote social justice. These prompts are sparks for your drawings, which you can interpret and explore in any creative way you look. You are the artist and your voice, outlook, perspectives and ideas surrounding these terms are important.

For this drawing challenge, Francine encourages you to not only to develop your artistic practice, artistic voice and drawing skills, but also to use it as an opportunity to explore different drawing mediums (or you could even use these prompts to create art in any art medium if you prefer!).

Some drawing mediums you could explore are: charcoal, coloured pencils, coloured markers, fineliners, paint pens, ink, watercolour pencils, oil pastels and conte crayons, pen, pencils, dry/chalk pastels and crayons – or, digital drawing, of course!

For those wanting to explore some different drawing materials throughout the challenge, there is a list of helpful videos below to help you explore some of these key drawing materials. But the best thing about a drawing challenge is that you can literally do it with just a grey lead pencil!

Be sure to watch the video above too! There’s an example by established illustrators and artists for each of the prompts, and some motivational and thought-provoking words that may spark your own artistic journey as a response.