Once upon an Art Room: August 2012

Thursday 9 August 2012

Embossed Owls

Materials: Card (A5 or A4 size)
Pencil
PVA Glue (ideally in a bottle with a narrow tip)
Aluminium Foil
Sharpies, felt pens or coloured permanent markers
*Optional: Spray Adhesive (you can just paint on a thin layer of PVA glue to adhere the foil to the card instead)

Watch the demo video on YouTube and read the instructions below before making your embossed owl.

We first drew our designs onto white card. Then we outlined them with a permanent marker so that the lines were easy to see. Using PVA glue we 'drew' a glue line over the owl outline and left it to dry.

When the glue was dry, we sprayed a small amount of spray adhesive onto the owl and covered it with a sheet of aluminium foil (make the foil sheet slightly larger than the piece of white card). We then gently rubbed over the foil so that it adhered closely to the lines of dried glue underneath. To emboss we used blunt pencils to add designs onto the owl and patterns into the background.

Lastly we added some colour. We worked straight onto the foil with coloured permanent markers. If students wanted to make their colours lighter and a bit more subtle, we used a tissue to rub off most of the permanent marker as soon as it was applied.

Monday 6 August 2012

Sponge Leaf and Flower Prints

Love these! A simple (and cheap) project using kitchen sponges. We have done a few versions of this by using the sponges to make leaf, flower or fruit prints. These are some of the results....(The fruit basket print was done to go with book, 'Handa's Surprise').

Sunday 5 August 2012

Paper Mache Balloons

Another project that has been done by many.....but is always popular with my students. It is very messy and chaotic and does need quite a bit of preparation, but the results are worth it!

Firstly, you will need balloons blown up to a medium capacity. Make a half and half mix of water and PVA glue and cut up LOTS of newspaper strips! We used large plastic plates to put our glue into so that we could lay our newspaper strips into the mix and get it well coated before applying it to the balloon. It will need multiple layers, but it is a bit of a balance between making it strong enough and not making it so thick and heavy that the balloon pops and the paper mache isn't able to maintain its shape. Don't forget to lay plastic sheets EVERYWHERE and have prepared buckets of warm water and sponges for the clean up!

To finish them off we painted brightly coloured patterns on with acrylic paint.

Friday 3 August 2012

My Art Room

I love looking at pictures of other art rooms - I invariably see something I want to try....or rooms that I'm just plain jealous of!! I thought it was time to post some photos of my own art room. So here is a little organised chaos for you......

Delaunay & Seurat Class Murals

I wasn't sure about doing this project. I was a little worried that it might be too much like colour by numbers. It ended up being great though - the Year 3 kids gained an understanding of colour mixing, some good painting skills and a bit of teamwork and sharing thrown in - a whole class sharing only one set of colours definitely required all of us to be patient!

This and other murals can be downloaded at: http://www.artprojectsforkids.org/

The finished murals!

Collographs

A great project to use up all the little bits of card that you have lying around! (I use old cereal boxes or leftover pieces of white card). We created everything from faces to monsters and Delaunay inspired abstract patterns. For faces, students constructed a face by cutting out each element from the card and gluing it onto a separate piece of paper or card. Students then make a rubbing print from their collograph. We chose to also paint the background using complimentary coloured ink. To finish off, we turned each of our faces into a different 'character' - we had everything from clowns to cyborgs, kings, queens and even pirates!