Adult paint nights and “Paint and Sips” have gained massive popularity in the past years for providing a relaxing atmosphere to be creative with friends and family.
 
But paint and sips are not just for Friday nights with the girls - participating in art creation with your coworkers and employees could be just the thing your office needs to create happier and healthier relationships between team members that results in boosted company morale, increased communication, and over all improved productivity.
 
Here are few reasons to choose a painting event for your next team-building initiative:

​1. Relaxed environment

​There may be many options out there for team-building events, but not many of them provide a relaxed, stress-free environment in which to interact with your team like an art-making event. The painting activity serves as a focus task that provides common ground rather than a high-stakes project where perfection is the goal. Instructors lead your group through the pre-planned project that can be easily followed along, while leaving room for chatting, bonding, and general enjoying oneself and the company of those around. 

2. Refreshed Creativity

​The act of creating a painting encourages participants to utilize their creative problems-solving skills and can encourage even “art-phobic” students to gain confidence in their creativity when they see what they can accomplish.
 
Creativity in the workplace doesn’t mean prettier spreadsheets, but translates to creative thinking and creative problem solving. By practicing creativity and practicing as a group, you’re making an investment in your team’s outside-the-box solutions and ability to see and meet challenges differently.

3. Low-Stakes Risk Taking

​We often see participants who are SURE they are terrible at creating art and that they would NEVER be able to make a successful painting. But by working step-by-step with our team-building instructors, we show participants how to break the challenge of the painting into smaller achievable parts.
 
By the end of the class, they have their own beautiful rendition of the painting and teams leave with a sense of accomplishment, and excitement for conquering a fun challenge together as a group. Not only does this create a closer bond between members and a boost to personal confidence, but by providing a positive experience that pushed them outside their comfort zones, they may be more willing to step outside their comfort zones in the future as well.

4. Reduced Stress

Stress in the office not only decreases productivity, majorly lowers moral AND accounts for many employee absences, but it’s also contagious.
 
However, the act of art making has been proven to reduce stress and can have positive effects on your employees’ bodies and minds. A 2016 study showed that up to 75% of participants who participated in an art session experienced a reduction in their cortisol levels (the stress hormone).
 
 
Team painting events provide an excellent way to foster unity in a non-competitive, creative environment with an experience that focuses on self-expression, creativity, and relationship building.
 
Learn more about our Team-Building Paint Events and how we can benefit your next office group activity here.

This year, we’ve been talking about each of our summer camps in a way we never have online before: we’re giving you the low-down on all of our camps and what goes on in them in our Camp Focuses blog series.
 
And now we’re on the final installment of our Camp Focuses series: Pottery Camp (check out our most recent post: “What is Drawing Camp?” for the others in the series). Our Friday Pottery Camps are different from our other camps in three main ways:

1. They’re only one day long, whereas our other camps are four days long.
2. They’re a full day of camp (9am-4pm), whereas our other camps are half-day camps (either 9am-noon, or 1pm-4pm).
3. They're always on Fridays.

 
Why? Short answer is: we’re working with low-fire ceramic clay and that material lends itself better to a full, one-day camp, as opposed to smaller periods of time spread out over a week.
 
Our Friday pottery camps are a fun way for campers to get their hands dirty, explore all things ceramics, and get personal with low-fire clay!

To ensure that pieces remain fully intact through firing, campers must be sure to follow all of the rules of hand building. This means building pieces that are well thought out, avoid components that are extremely delicate, and correctly use the very important attaching technique of scoring and slipping.
 
Students even have to think about airflow through their pieces, and avoid accidentally trapping pockets of air inside, or their creation could explode in the kiln!
 
During camp, campers regularly follow the guidance of their instructors as well as use creative problem-solving skills to create a successful final product.  

Of course, the most popular aspect of pottery camp is the pottery wheel!
 
The pottery wheel is a machine that is used to shape a vessel. During pottery camp, campers work one-on-one with an instructor to create their very own pottery wheel vessel.
 
Creating on the wheel is a fun and messy process, and campers learn how to utilize their hand-eye coordination and their muscle control to manipulate the spinning clay that results in specific shapes depending on how you hold your hands and interact with the clay. 
 
Once students create their vessel on the wheel, campers have a second wheel experience where they’re able to trim the excess clay off the bottom of their sculpture, a vital step in creating pottery, allowing a clean-finished piece.

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One of the benefits of attending multiple pottery camps is that campers become more familiar with the processes. Like any kind of skills, the ones campers learn on the pottery wheel and while hand building take practice to get better and to be able to create more intricate and advanced works.
 
Multiple experiences on the pottery wheel allow campers to have better control on the wheel and make more complex vessels. Familiarity with multiple hand-building processes also allows students to combine more than one process into a single project. 
 
We often have campers who sign up for pottery camp after pottery camp because they love it so much and look forward to continuing the development of their skills.
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Our pottery camps are very popular, and typically fill up very quickly. If you’re still hoping to get your child into one of these camps this year, we’d suggest enrolling them as soon as possible – check out our schedule and sign up for a camp here. We'd love to have them!