(Completed the strands Creativity and Service.)

Creative Mela is an event that gives people an opportunity to interact, to become creative and develop some skills and interests. I was a volunteer in the Mela. This is because I am highly passionate about arts and I wanted to take this experience in order to convey my creative skills to others. As a result, I held the “texture art” workshop. Students from Grade 7 to 9 came and each made 1-2 works.

Through this experience I was able to experience my strengths. I identified that I am good at arranging a workshop. I was able to manage all of the students and the experience was very beautiful. Now that I am aware of this, I will be able to apply these skills in the future. It is important for us to know our strengths so that we can work on those and extend it. These skills could be useful in our careers or extracurriculars. However, when the first batch of students came in , it was a bit difficult for us to manage the POP. This is because it would dry quickly and make it hard for the students to apply it as per their need. This was one of the weakness that I identified. However, as soon as I identified this, I came up with an alternative. What we made them do instead of applying POP on the canvas was trying out another method of texture art which is through dipping cloth into POP. This was way easier. Knowing my weakness benefited me because I could work on it right away.

Even though I have had experience of texture art before, I have never actually conducted a workshop. This was what was challenging. To get the resources ready, to set the canvases, to prepare the POP every time a new batch comes in, all of this was very new to me. It was challenging because it is not easy to handle 10 students at a time. They all have different needs. This challenge was difficult but what helped me overcome it was my team. We were a group of 3 and we decided to divide our tasks properly. While one of us provided demo, the other would prepare the POP and the third was set the other resources. This made the workshop function properly.

Like I mentioned above, we were a group of 3 where we divided our tasks properly. Working with others is generally easy for me because I like to take up responsibility if the others are also willing to. However sometimes I like to be in control. This is because some people don’t just work. And when you are in control, you can ask them to work. But this experience was not such. Working in 3 was easy because we could easily divide ourselves. Since we all were Visual Arts students we knew exactly how to work. It is important to work collaboratively with others in all the scenarios. Because we all are dependent on each other in some or the other way and if you understand what the other is trying to say, it just makes the work easier. Teamwork in my activity was highly important. We were working with POP which would dry out very fastly, so one of us would prepare the POP while the other 2 would help the students prepare the other resources and show them the demo. This way the kids understood the task and also enjoyed it.

To conclude, this CAS experience helped me develop a few learner profiles-

• Communicators- We got to communicate with kids who were younger than us and while performing the activity, we exchanged a lot of knowledge
• Inquirers- This activity made me inquire what are the different ways that texture art can be done and a few of which I tried in this.

Creative Mela is a really good platform to learn new creative skills while also demonstrating some. When there were breaks between workshop, I got to go to the other ones and explore what they were doing. I developed a lot of new skills such as dot mandala art, bracelet making, clay art and a few others. This activity did bring a sense of accomplishment to me when the texture worked out just as we had imagined and the students could take their work along with them. Overall, this CAS experience helped me learn a ton of new skills.