Summer Camp 2026 - Pop Week

Pop Week at EAPS Summer Camp was all about the fun intersection of Pop Art and pop culture! From familiar foods and favorite characters to comic books and iconic artists, campers explored how artists take imagery from everyday life and transform it into something bold, playful, and unexpected.

And what’s more fun to pop than bubbles? We kicked off the week with ceramic dishes glazed using a bubble painting technique. Campers carefully mixed soap with diluted pottery glaze, blew mountains of bubbles, and let them overflow across their ceramics to create one-of-a-kind patterns. Once their bubbly backgrounds were complete, they painted their own characters and imagery on top, ranging from marine life to SpongeBob and friends.

Next, we combined two things everyone loves: toast popping out of a toaster and adorable Jellycat-inspired faces! Campers used clay slabs to construct ceramic toast trinket trays, adding tiny feet, pats of butter, bows, hearts, and other accessories to give each piece its own personality.

Then we dove into the world of Roy Lichtenstein, comic books, and Pop Art printing techniques. We looked at how Lichtenstein used limited colors, bold outlines, and Ben-Day dots to mimic the appearance of mass-produced comic printing. Campers created their own Spider-Man-inspired portraits, using Q-tips to carefully build colorful fields of dots and experience the technique firsthand.

Our next project turned into a miniature 3D pop-up art museum! Using paper templates, campers constructed gallery halls complete with walls and columns, then became curators of their own exhibitions. They chose from miniature versions of recognizable paintings and sculptures, with an emphasis on Pop Art, or created original masterpieces to hang in their galleries.

Next up: Pop-Tarts! Campers invented their own flavors and created oversized mixed-media pastries from cardboard, painting colorful frosting, sprinkles, and designs before using thread to weave around the edges to create the recognizable crust. Despite what eating a Pop-Tart might do to a room full of kids, making one had the opposite effect - the repetitive threading process was surprisingly calming and therapeutic, and our creatively charged studio suddenly became very quiet and focused!

For our guided painting project, Miss Diana led campers step-by-step through creating stylized Pop Art animal portraits. Starting with simple shapes to establish the animal's form, campers built their paintings layer by layer before adding expressive colors, patterns, details, and backgrounds that made every finished piece completely their own.

Finally, we explored the energetic work of Keith Haring and his instantly recognizable visual language of bold lines, simplified figures, movement, and repetition. Campers traced graphic templates and surrounded them with bright patterns and thick, expressive marks to create vibrant compositions inspired by his playful approach to art.

Pop Week showed us that art inspiration can come from just about anywhere - even the toy aisle or the snack cabinet! It was another colorful, creative, and very POP-filled week at EAPS.