Beginning An Art Camp

I have begun an art camp for the summer teaching the children from my home town. It is a fun experiment for myself since I am going through the art education program at college and am hoping to do this in my future. My last name is Redd (red)... surprise! So since I have a fondness of puns the name of the camp is Color Me Redd Art Camp. I am going to be posting all the fun adventures I have with the children during the camp on this blog and my findings from teaching. I hope you enjoy! for your entertainment here is my logo I created:

Batik Tutorial

Batik is a type of fabric created in South East Asia. It is a long hard process where they use wax to seal in colors and dip fabric in dye.

Here is a picture of someone creating a traditional batik

 However, for the sake of economy we are going to do an easier method to teach our children to create their own fabric. So to begin off with you need to have a muslim, or 100% non-dyed cotton fabric that you cut into squares with pinking sheers so that the edges do not fray.

Picture of beginning supplies you need- 15' X 15' muslim and large paper

Here is a picture of the designs that I drew out initially before deciding upon what to do my batik as, make sure to have the children sketch out ideas so they can do the process of elimination and critiquing their own works and ideas.

This is the final design I came up with and drew it out on the piece of paper with a sharpie so that I could see it.Have the children draw out the design that they would like to have as the 'white' of their fabric, it can be a geometric design, organic design, representational, nonrepresentational- they get to decide, or you can have them do it in a theme. Then draw their picture onto a large piece of paper. 

Time to make the paste to create the paste it is 1 cup flour + 1 cup water + 1 tsp alum. You can find alum at your grocery store in the spices aisle, it's fairly common, though I never heard of it before this project. When you have created your paste make sure to mix it together thoroughly so that it doesn't have clumps and put it in a squirt bottle for the children.

Put the cloth back over the paper and line it up over the drawing so you have a visual as to where to put the paste on the cloth. Then have the children squirt the paste onto the fabric. Warning: the paste like to sometimes come out faster than you want or slower, also why it is important to mix the paste well before hand. No worries just go with the flow, I'm going to quote Bob Ross "no mistakes, just 

happy accidents" with your projects!

It takes a little bit to dry the paste so be patient! When the paste is dry paint onto the fabric with tempera paint (make sure it is not washable, or it will wash out later and subside into tears).  And then let the paint dry all the way also.

When the paint is dry peel off the flour paste from the fabric. It should at this time be hard and come off in nice little chunks, slowly but surely you will get to the end of it. Also don't be afraid if it doesn't turn out like you expected, sometimes it is fatter lines or thinner and it won't show up. I just chose one color to paint so you could see it easier, but children can mix up their colors easily. Just a warning the first layer that you put down is the color that will be there so mix before painting on the fabric, because that will be the color.

When you are done peeling off the paste you will need to wash the fabric in warm-hot water. When you are washing the fabric it will have some paint come off and make the colors fade. When you are done washing the fabric let it dry and then it is done!

rub a dub, dub, the fish is in the tub!

Here is the final outcome that should occur!

Here is a picture also of the original project that I created. It had a flaw where I painted a really light pink and it faded almost completely gone. I chose to do this design because not only do I love the outdoors and flowers, but I wanted it to reflect the traditional designs created in batiks.

Hope you enjoyed this and it works out in the future! And if you need another tutorial here is one at Elementary Art Education: Batik Tutorial

Practicum

So a practicum is a student teaching I had the opportunity to do this past semester with our laboratory school. I was lucky enough to do it with an art specialist and created my own lesson plan. I did a focus on Community portraits and teaching First graders what a community is and why it is important to participate in one and understand that everyone in the community is individuals and has similarities and differences. For the art project it was done on one large piece of butcher paper where they traced their selves on the paper and had it overlapping with their neighbors. In the spaces of their body they filled it with designs, colors or things that represent themselves and made them an individual. In the spaces that overlapped with their neighbor they found similarities and filled the space with pictures, colors or anything that was similar between the neighbors. This was a fun project to do with the children and here are some pictures of the results!

Here is a picture of the children's outlines that they did of eachother

Tracing, have a friend help, but let the children trace the insides of their own legs

Here is some examples of children's overlapping

Note: using water tempra will cause a very big mess, and for some odd reason children find joy in actually splashing the water around onto other children's outlines- so be careful with the water they have.

Hope you enjoyed the art project community portraits and are able to make it into a project you can use with your own children or community! Have Fun!

Expanding 8

In class we did a collaborative art work that was also crossed with a math lesson- sounds like bounds of fun right! The project has every student drawing on a projector film (clear plastic) and had to graph out dots from a graph and then draw from the coordinate points.

Below is a picture of my project, each different color is from a different person adding to the artwork, and it was a collaborative of four people.

sorry ignore my reflection in the artwork, it's me.

In order to create this artwork you have four children and create a math graphing flash card where each children need to complete the task. Example student 1: x= 1+2, y= 7+3, etc. Once all the children have plotted their coordinates they then draw straight lines between their dots and create an art work out of it. The four children will add their projector film to create the final artwork. Have fun with this one!

Milk Jug African Masks

African masks are used traditionally for rituals of coming of age. In modern societies they are used as decoration and a trade item. African masks have influenced a lot on modern society, including influencing Pablo Picasso's art. One example is Picasso's painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon; in this painting the faces of the ladies represent african masks. Though for this project we are going to focus on the symmetrical design elements of the mask and recreating the traditional look for the masks. As I have said before it is important to teach your children through art, we art teaching culture this time as we teach how to make the mask. To make a mask you can use many different elements- paper plates, actual wood, but we used milk jugs. Take an empty milk jug and cut it out to get your base for the mask. Once you have the mask cut out eye slits for the mask also. Since milk jugs are see through we are going to tape over the whole mask with masking tape. You can create texture with the masking tape and add onto the mask also. Once the mask is completely covered you cover it with shoe shine and then once that is dry you paint onto it and add on beads and dried grass or rafia. You add hair to the mask by punching holes into the mask and tying the hair material through it.

Below is my african mask I made:

I chose to take the milk jug handle and make it into my mask's nose and painted a symmetrical pater onto the mask for design. If you were able to look closer at my mask there is texture made by the tape so that the mask and the shoe shine did not go on evenly. I chose to do this mask because today in our society when there is a coming of age for a man it is when they grow a beard. Beards are a huge thing in society (especially in my family with my brother) and they have become a sign of a man. I hope you enjoy creating with your students! Here is a link to a tutorial at Elementary Art Methods 3700: Milk Jug Masks Tutorial

Coil/Pinch Pot

Maria Martinez is one of the most famous potter of San Ildefonso Pueblo. She created her pottery by making the clay and doing the traditional pottery making and then fired them in a kiln using cow pies as the fuel, which gave the distinctive black glazing look. She is an important figure in attempting to keep the traditions of the Native Americans and pottery alive and continued to do this into old age (like 98 or something crazy like that... go research it).  A beautiful essay on Maria can be found at the website http://www.medicinemangallery.com/Maria-Martinez-article.lasso to help you teach your children about her art.  Below is an image of one of her pottery though.

For our assignment however, we focused on the importance of pottery, and the two different types of pottery out of many that you can do; pinch and coil. Maria Martinez did Pinch pottery and that is why we went into her background information, plus it is good to teach children art history as you teach them art. In pinch pottery you begin with a ball of clay and begin pinching out the side and up into a form you want. Now the type of clay depends on if you have access to a kiln or not. Sometimes you will be able to team up with the high schools with a ceramics course and have them fire up your pots as they do other projects. If you are able to get it fired make sure that the sides are pinched evenly so that they do not explode in the kiln. But for most projects just use an air drying clay (Crayola has some good air drying clay, but there are a lot of varieties of clay to use) and it is quicker. The children can pinch any object they desire (I choose a tea cup) and then let it dry overnight or get fired. When they are done have them paint their pots or glaze them so that they can make them even more unique to themselves. With air drying clay you can use acrylic, tempera paint and watercolor paint to paint the pots. Each has a different finish however- acrylic has a shine since it is plastic like, tempera is a chalky matt finish, and watercolor is just a matt finish.  Below is my project:

I did a tea cup with a watercolor finish. Inside of the tea cup it has holes in it to make it look like a sand dollar and the outsides are painted to mimic the tones in an ocean. I chose to create this tea up because I collect tea cups and I love the ocean, it has a soothing cool tones to it that calm anyone down, and yet it is so unpredictable. I hope you enjoy doing this with your students, and here is a tutorial at My Artistic Odyssey: Pinch Pot Tutorial

wire

The artist Alexander Calder created an art work called Calder's Circus which was a sculpture that was created using wire and some other materials. The art work was created in the late 1920s and was an iconic work that is owned by the Whittney museum in New York, New York. Here is a picture of the Cirque Calder:

 Our goal this assignment was to create our own circus and create a collaborative art piece where everyone made their own part of the circus in wire sculpture form. The assignment is to create something out of wire that you would see at a circus. The final produce must be 3D. This is a harder material for children to work in so you can get weaker wire, but for my assignment I used bailing wire from home depot which is a normal wire medium for college students to use but may be too hard for children to cut and bend. You will need to also supervisor your children as they cut the wire and make sure they are not hurting themselves, cause that is never fun. Below is my wire sculpture I created for the project:

I created a hot air balloon because I was just recently in New Mexico during the hot air balloon festival and was able to see hot air balloons in real life. You also get to see hot air balloons with circus's such as in the Wizard of Oz. We suspended my piece above the other collaborating sculptures. Here is a link to the tutorial at It's a Love Hate Kind of Thing: Wire Sculpture + Tutorial: