Mask Making from Every Day Objects

Designing dresses, hats, and masks was a fun way to get students to see how every day objects can be made into costumes for theater. It's an exercise in creativity to look at one thing and see something else. It's that kind of ability that made a butter container and roll on deodorant into the first computer mouse. Some of my students saw faces in paper bags, cardboard boxes, or pie pans. Mask making wrapped our our costume design month and I think most of the students were pleased with their work. It's hard to tell how they really were feeling though, because of the masks. 

Costume Design Project: The Hundred Dresses

Food inspired one student's dress designs: mochi, banana splits, onigiri, candy apples etc.

 To incorporate literature and career education into our art project, I read my students a book from 1944 called "The Hundred Dresses" by Eleanor Estes. It's a Newberry honor book and top 100 teachers pick to read aloud. This sweet story tells of an impoverished girl who was bullied for saying she had 100 dresses, and after she moved they saw that she had 100 amazing drawings of dresses. My students and I made a goal to create 100 dress designs for our next exhibit.

One students obsession with architecture was his fashion line inspiration

Each student was to pick a theme for their designs. Some students were inspired by food, animals, seasons, or architecture. They could base their designs on a color pallet, a culture, or a decade. It's a great chance for each kid to explore their interests and express themselves. 

From celestial orbs to seasons of the year, there was lots of ideas for fashion themes.

Netflix has an amazing series called "Abstract," so we watched the episode about costume designer Ruth Carter (minus a few minutes with bad language). It gives a great look into the process and the career of costume design. Most art students have no idea how much research professional artists and designers put into their job.

animals can have always inspired fashion: zebra, peacock, clown fish and mantis shrimp

David Byrne's cult classic "True Stories" has a scene of a fantastic fashion show. I show that 4 minute clip to my students for inspiration, and then a behind the scenes documentary which is only 5 minutes. A quick discussion helps students generate ideas and push boundaries. When it comes to costume ideas, creativity counts.

P.S. This project was modified to accommodate students with no vision. Some made their drawings with Wiki Stix, while others mixed and matched heads, torsos and legs to create images using Fashion Plates. I want to give a shout out to my sister, Carolyn, for sending me this favorite childhood toy (she bought a new one for me). It's a perfect tactile solution for blind students to participate in the project independently.

Costume Design Unit: Hats!

It's one thing to draw your ideas for a fashion or costume design, it's another thing to actually make that idea into something wearable. The beautiful part of our recent art project was that it teaches problem solving skills. The challenge I presented to my Art students to was to create something they could wear on their head. A hat or a wig for example. They were welcome to rummage through any supplies and and figure out how to make their vision a reality. Sometimes visions changed based on certain items not sticking together, or the colors of spray paints available. 

Hot glue may melt thin plastic, staples may break brittle materials. Balloons shrivel overnight. It's important to play around with the process of assembling things. What will look like sprinkles on frosting or whipped cream? Beads, bits of foam, or cut up pipe cleaners? How can I get this thing to stay on my head?

This project is the perfect example of differentiation, when it comes to ability level and interest. There was no one example, no cookie cutter process. Some students wanted to make top hats while others made sun hats. Some made helmets and others made crowns. No two were alike. It was exhausting as a teacher to have to help each student think through their set backs and find what they were looking for, but the pay off was worth it when it came time for our photo shoot.

The cherry on top 

Was it worth saving that box of toilet paper rolls for 10 years? You be the judge.

A sunflower sun hat

Several students made crowns

My Dr. Who fan had a tartus on his mind

Muted Color Relief Sculpture

Last week, my students helped to create boxy, relief sculpture using saturated colors. This week they helped make a relief sculpture using curvy shapes and muted colors.

A color can only be as bright as it is when you buy it in the bottle. You can however make the color more dull by essentially contaminating it. There are two ways to mute a color: by adding gray or by adding its opposite color and the color wheel (its complement). If you want to make a bright orange into a rust color, add a little blue. A bright yellow can become a brown mustard with a little purple mixed in. 

Every student chose a color to mute and then paint on curved cardboard shapes. I didn't limit them to part of the palette like last week when it was just pink or colors with lots of yellow. The fact that all the colors are moving towards grays and browns means they have the intensity in common, and that's enough to look good tother. 

Analogous Painted Box Tactile Sculpture

 

What can you do with an old coffee table top and a bunch of tiny boxes handed to you in a garbage bag? Make a relief sculpture for a color theory lesson of course!

For this project, students painted the boxes on one side of the color wheel, ranging from pink to green. Students mixed yellow with the pink and yellow with some blue so that most of the colors were warm and cheerful.

Students needed vision to mix the colors but didn't need any vision to feel whether or not their box was covered with paint. We all worked together to finish 135 boxes in 9 rows of 15. The coffee table had a light spray paint coverage with blacks so that some of the old scratches were covered.

Then we used masking tape to make rows and light up the squares.

It was nothing short of a miracle that the width of the tape on each age, and a tape widths between each row and column worked out to fill the space exactly.  It was a real win for the power of eye-balling and guess work. We were just guessing how many boxes we'd need. It took two people to light up the ends of the tape on either side of a box. We didn't use rulers to measure, just the width of a box.

I glued the bottoms down with hot glue and now we have a tactile sculpture that we can use to discuss things like: rectilinear shapes, crystalographic balance, analogous color schemes, and high intensity. 

Adjusting Color and Learning about Color Science.

Students practice finding the right hue, saturation, and value to get match a target color on the smart board

It's been fun helping students understand the science of color. There are so many great videos and podcasts about it. We talk about refracted light, how cones in our eyes receive color, how color can evoke emotions, the history and use of symbolic colors in art, why some of them are color blind...it's all fascinating.

My students responded well to the Science of Color videos and activities on Kahn academy. The color scientist from Pixar explains concepts in an easy to understand way, and shows how color was applied to certain scenes in movies to create a mood and communicate a message.

Students got a chance to try to create and match colors, and edit colors from movie stills to create more contrast or greater harmony. Below is an example of how I adjusted color in a watercolor to make it more coherent. It's important for my students to learn that they can adjust what they've put on paper or in a digital piece of artwork to make things better.

When color range is too wide, it looks chaotic

Adding blue to the yellows makes the composition analogous.

the dark background make the colors look like they're glowing

 

Triadic Color Scheme Compositions

There are three basic classifications of color: Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary. The primary colors are three equally spaced on the color wheel. The Secondary are also equally spaced color wheel and anytime you use three equally spaced colors on the color wheel you get a TRIADIC COLOR SCHEME. 

For this quick project, students put pen to paper and use a line to create either curvilinear or rectilinear shapes. They could go back in and add some overlapping shapes. Then they picked either the primary colors or the secondary colors to make a triadic color study.

I expect my students who are blind to know the names of the primary and secondary colors and to draw their compositions, choosing what kind of shapes they want to make. I traced these drawings in hot glue so they could paint within the tactile perimeters for each color.