Repoussé project

 The word repoussé comes from the French word, "to push" and essentially means to push the metal from the back of a piece of metal foil to create an embossed image. 

This was the first project in my class unit on relief sculpture. It is an easy way to create tactile images for my students who are blind.

Students began with sketches of ideas, one of which they chose to transfer to a thick piece of tooling foil. If the foil is set on a piece of chip board or stack of paper you can trace a drawing with a pen and it will transfer to the foil with embossed lines. But my blind students had to re-"draw" their ideas using Wiki Stix, which they could then trace to make the embossed lines.

Rubbing with a rounded plastic stick pushes the foil from back to the front to make your the front raised or budge out. Then rubbing around the form with a flat stick makes it pop out even more. Edges are re-defined and cleaned up with sharp pointed points. For large areas, we found the lids or bottoms of fat Sharpie markers worked pretty well for repoussé.

Then most students opted to color their images with Sharpies. These colors are more bright and permenant than our normal Mr. Sketch on the foil.

Then students painted the entire surface with black paint, whether they'd colored the surface or not. It's important to get into the cracks so the lines show up on the final product.

While the paint is still wet, begin wiping gently in circular motions with a paper towel. You'll go throughs several of them as they get dirty pretty quickly. You want the raised portions to really have a shine, while the cracks should be able to stay black. Reveal as many details as possible without overwiping.

Younger children can wrap boards with thick string or yarn and cover it with aluminum foil and just rub with their fingers to make an embossed foil project. This student chose to use greens and blues to fill the shapes using Sharpie markers.

Yarn Collage Images

Younger kids and multiple complex needs students make a lot of art using only lines. I started the school year teaching about vertical and horizontal lines. We then moved onto to diagonal lines, and finally curvy lines that show movement. Because my students are blind, it is always a good idea to end with a tactile image. Students chose a the color of their piece of paper, and the color of the yearn they wanted to make a curvy line from one edge of their paper to another. Then it was a matter of picking the next color of yarn to push against it. The end results are soft, fuzzy Op Art. 

Little Kids Garden Painting

While cleaning out my attic, I came across a box of leis, which I bought for a luau themed party that I never threw. Rather than throwing it away, I brought it to school and had my multiple complex needs students use them for a mixed media art piece.

As a class, we talked about how you don't need a paint brush to paint, you could use a sponge, a mop or your fingers. Then we wadded up plastic leis and dipped them into green and yellow paint to pat on paper for a background color for our garden art. Before the paint was even dry, students picked colors of flowers from the silk flower leis and glued them to the surface. It's a quick project and a great lesson for kids to learn about mixed media art, the concept of background and foreground, and planting gardens.

Wesleyan Collage Workshop

 The Wesleyan College Leadership Lab has started a series Called Level Up, where community members can take part in Learning Experiences with poet Laureates and experts on AI. The first in the series was a collage workshop presented by none other than Dennis Applebee, the Art Department Chair, and my hubby. He walked participants through the history of collage and his process before turning us lose with books, art paper, X-Acto knives, and archival glue sticks.  The number one problem students make? Not putting enough glue and having the edges curl up. He uses a piece of copy paper to cover the freshly glued collage piece and rubs it pretty hard in every direction with a flat tool to make sure the glue goes into the fibers of both pieces of paper, with rubbing the image or snagging the surfaces. A lot of people left with some really nice pieces. 

Dennis had his art show hanging at the Leadership Lab throughout the month of August, so it was nice to have lots of examples of finished projects. How lucky am I to be married to such a talented guy?

Make Your Own Quiet Book for Kids

 When my I was a young mother with a toddler and a pre-schooler, I struggled to keep my boys quiet at church. My solution was to sew an activity book. I started by cutting out a stack of light denim for the pages and then drew my ideas in pencil before painting, gluing and sewing details for each page. I probably got some of my ideas from friends since this was long before the days of Pinterest and craft blogs. Most of the pieces are now missing, but before I tossed the book, I wanted to document some of the activities in case I ever need a Christmas gift idea for grandchildren.

The book started with a dresser shaped pocket filled with clothes that could be used to dress a boy, like a velcro version of a paper doll. I used to paint on white fabric, glue it to felt and then cut it out to give it a little stiftf-ness to make flannel board activities, so I assume I did that here as well.

Because the pages were sewn together using the zig-zag stitch, I could leave the bottom open between the front and back of a page for kids to use their finger as a trunk and pretend to drink from a barrel of water. I also made a pocket for a pad of paper and pencil. Drawing is always a great quiet activity.

I made this book years before I ever got a cell phone, so my kids at least would have recognized a receiver, which is now missing from the book and from our lives. They could removed the receiver from the Velcro it if they wanted to pretend to talk, or they could push the numbers when I'd recite a phone number.  I can only assume that the hand page was for adding rings or counting. But I don't really remember. What's that hand doing there?

The lion's tale had three cords for learning to braid and the caterpillar hand colored cirlces to rearrange and than try to match up. At the school for the Blind, this would be a great Functional Vision Assessment to determine whether or not a child is color blind.

Strips of felt were for learning to weave, and a brad held some clock hands to rotate and learn time telling.