vablearn: Pete Emslie caricatures a teenage girl

Above is the test show for vablearn, Visual Arts Brampton's free instructional video project. Thanks to a 2008 grant from the Ontario Trillium Foundation, VAB has purchased a digital video camera and is paying select artists to teach video workshops.

This test episode features Pete Emslie drawing a caricature of Emily Kowalik, co-instructor of VAB's 6-to-8-year-old youth classes. Outlining the steps he takes to draw a caricature, the image unfolds in this roughly 11 minute clip. Future episodes will be released in HD, with better sound; this first episode was an equipment test.

View the episodes as they're posted at visualartsbrampton.blip.tv, or subscribe for free, via iTunes.

New Trillium grant for VAB

We can officially announce today that Visual Arts Brampton has received a grant from the Ontario Trillium Foundation.

In their words, our grant is: "$10,000 over one year to support the delivery of new media and video-on-demand workshops for children and adults in the community by purchasing new computer equipment and helping to obtain instructors."

To break that down:
- we're getting new laptops which will allow us to restart our digital art training in the youth classes, and start workshops for adults,
- we'll be interviewing members about their art, using a digital video camera, and making those video segments on our website,
- taping segments about the studio, its programming, events, and exhibits, all of which will be available on our website,

Most importantly, we will be making a series of high definition video art instructional "vodcasts", which will be available where ever, whenever, to whomever. At least one 3 to 7 minute episode will be released each week for at least a year.

These workshops can be watched online as high quality full-screen streaming video, or subscribed to and downloaded through RSS feeds or iTunes, so that they can be watched offline on your computer, portable media player, burned to a DVD to watch on your TV, whatever.

Anyway, this is just a "soft announce", we won't be making too much of a deal about this project, until we have more to show for it.


More about Trillium and their grants

We are in the Halton-Peel "catchment area"; these 27 grants for our area total of $2,630,800. Across the province this year, Trillium's annual budget is $110 million, and will be further increased to $120 million by 2009-2010. [See Halton-Peel press release]

Ontario Minister of Culture Aileen Carroll noted to Trillium in a press release that “Our government is committed to fostering healthy and vibrant communities, right across Ontario. These Ontario Trillium Foundation grants will help build a stronger province by fuelling local economies and improving the quality of life of Ontarians.