Indonesia Inspired Batik Project

Batik is the art of making images on fabric and it is so important in Indonesia that they have a National Holiday celebrating it: October 2nd. UNESCO recognizes batik as a world heritage of humanity. Wax is melted and than used in a special tube pen to draw on fabric, or metal images are dipped in wax and stamped onto fabric. The wax acts as a stop out when the fabric is being dyed.  I had large blocks of wax for my students to feel, but we didn't want to mess with trying to keep it at the right temperature all day for a week, much less worry about burns on hot plates, so we went even more low tech: Glue.

Some of my students with no vision opted to use stencils, rather than try to make a free-hand drawing. The trick with this is to use a sponge brush, dip it in Elmer's glue, and then dab up and down, rather than making strokes that might go under the edges of the stencils. Getting enough glue on the fabric is also important.

Other students drew pictures or patterns with the bottle of glue. The fabric was transparent enough to trace marker drawings on a light box, but some choose to just wing it.

The next day, when the glue was dry, students painted their images with acrylic. I think it worked best when they worked within the lines, but if the glue was thick enough to start with, it was OK to cover the entire thing in a couple of colors. The underside of the fabric, generally maintained the stop out. The paint has to dry completely before trying to rinse the fabric, for obvious reasons.

Day three, is when we soaked the entire piece for at least 5-10 minutes in water before rubbing and rinsing the rest of the glue out.

There was a little magic in the reveal, that their original lines never left, they were just covered and then revealed.

a low vision student uses a digital magnifier to paint his glue spirals with spring colors

 

Homemade Clay Garden Mushrooms

What better way to give a little funky charm to your garden or potted plants than to "plant" some hand-made clay mushrooms.

I teach my students that basic ceramic hand building starts with learning to make three forms: a ball (for pinch pots), a snake (for oil pots), and a pancake (for building with flat slabs). This garden mushroom project, not only helps students use two of these techniques, but is serving as a fundraiser to coincide with a school plant sale. 

They start with a pinch pot to make the top of a mushroom, and then they make a coil for the stem. These are attached using a score and slip technique, and so a lot of basic skills are being practiced with one simple project. 

When the clay was still wet, we nestled the mushroom tops upside-down in newspaper cradled in a cup, sometimes wrapping paper towels around the stem to keep it from slumping over. Students could press  objects into the mushroom tops to make dots or lines to add texture to the surface.

The stem made for a perfect handle to glaze the mushroom top. This student is totally blind but was able to get a few coats of glaze on each of their mushrooms without any problem. It was a little tricky getting glaze from the top of the mushrooms from touching the kiln shelves, but I sponged off the edges and balanced the tops on little stilts. A couple of the tops came off in the bisque firing, but I managed to stand the stems up in kiln posts, put a blob of glaze at the top of each stem, and balanced the mushroom tops until the two parts fused together. Everyone was so happy to see all the colors after the glaze firing. 

Try finding mushroom combinations that either mimic or contrast with the plants pairing.

I had never heard about these until half a year ago, but this project has turned out to be a big hit with my students.  Students suggested prices as low as $1 and as high as $20.  We compromised at a $5 price, and we'll see how it goes. Here's to a successful fundraiser!

 

Puppetry Arts Field Trip

Living in Georgia means getting to be close to the largest puppet museums in North America. The Center for Puppetry Arts has 4,000 puppets, and the biggest collection of Jim Henson's masterpieces on earth.

Every 3 or 4 years I like to do some puppet making projects incorporating global cultures or performing arts and literature. This year my lesson spanned both as we were studying shadow puppets that have been in Chinese and Indonesian cultures for over 1,000 years. 

Most of the performances at the center are geared towards younger audiences, with Dr. Suess or Very Hungry Caterpillar type shows. But I found one that was definitely geared towards my high school students: Tales of Edgar Allen Poe. The sets were versitile, with doorways turned ship masts, stairways turned catecombs, paintings that became see-through, and table tops that became floor boards for hiding dead bodies. The puppets were also versitile: eyes popped out, or glowed from within. Faces changed, and corpses dismantled. The stories are pretty gruesome, but it's classic literature and my students loved every minute of smoke machines and folly artistry. I liked that it was as much about the language as the performance, so even my blind students could enjoy it with minimal audio description. See...another layer of literature incorporated into my art lesson.

There were lots of hands on opportunities. Half of the museum takes you through history and around the world, as the parts of the gallery are divided by continent. Our tour guide let students pass around at least 10 different kind of puppets, from African stick puppets, to Japanese Bunraku puppets, to Italian marionettes.

And the Jim Henson side of the museum, allowed students to try out what it might be like to be on a puppeteer on a TV show,

Movies and TV shows have used puppets to entertain masses, so it was fun to see the actual pieces used in the Lion King, Ghost Busters, Gumbi, Pinochio, and more!

It has been a couple decades, but I remember vividly the 3 field trips I took throughout my high school experience, two of which were with my art class. I count on my students looking back on the 4 Art field trips we took this year alone. This was the first year some of them have been to any sort of museum. I hope it is the start of a life long journey for them to explore the world and never stop learning about the Arts. 

 

Indonesian Shadow Puppet Making Project

Student made shadow puppets for Aesop's fable of the crow and the fox

Indonesia is the 4th most populated country in the world. There are 300 hundred ethnicities, 700 languages, and 120 volcanoes on the many islands that make up the country of Indonesia. And the animal species are varied, with Asian animals (such as tigers and elephants) on the western islands, and Australian animals (koalas and komodo dragons) on the eastern islands. Because my students are blind or visually impaired, I brought in the spices (such as cloves and nutmeg) for students to smell. These were important Indonesian spices that put them on the map in terms of trade. I brought in a model of the kind of boat people would have used to row from one island to another. And I made an Indonesian flag (red stripe and white stripe) to discuss the importance of symbolism in flags. 

The cow jumped over the moon!

Day 2 of the lesson was when I introduced my students to puppetry. Shadow puppets have been part of the culture of Indonesia for about 1,000 years. I knew that my students would have a chance to see and touch Indonesian shadow puppets at Atlanta's Center for Puppetry Arts, so I thought it would be a perfect way for us to tie in performing arts with cultural arts and prepare my students for our upcoming field trip.

Every student picked an animal or character. Some made characters from a nursery rhyme or fable, others just came up with their own animal or person to draw on a cheap piece of white paper. Then they cut out the the shape on black paper. Some body parts had paper clasps as hinges or joints for moving parts.

A few students  used cut holes as windows for stained glass by coloring laminating plastic with sharpies and than taping it to the puppet. 

Other students used paint pens to decorate their shadow puppets. Indonesian shadow puppets are all about the silhouette, with intricate holes cut to make a lacey shapes. But the puppets, often made of buffalo skin,  also had/have elaborate patterns painted onto them that will never been seen during a performance.

I used an old silk screen as a screen for the puppet theatre, for students to try their hand at puppetry.

 

Paper Bag Puppets

 

While my high schoolers could spend a week, with each student making enough shadow puppets to cast a small show, my elementary school students didn't have that kind of time...or skill set. We started simple, with paper bags. two dots on a bag is technically all you need for a puppet. I limited my students to green paper bags as the starting point and some students wanted to make animals like lizards and frogs, others wanted to make monsters or aliens. One made Elphaba from Wicked, another made a little green man with a bow tie and mustache. It's a short and simple assignment that has to do with making choices, finding resources, cutting and pasting. Ultimately, it's a project that shows how creativity is possible by having your own ideas and making those ideas tangible.

Lots of Dots: Aboriginal Inspired Dot Paintings

Did you know that there are more kangaroos than there are people in Australia? It was fun to study Australian history and culture with my students before making Aboriginal-inspired dot paintings. These paintings use symbols to represent things such as bodies of water or gatherings of people. Often they include handprints or or animal shapes. 

Dark paper made for a nice value contrast with bright or light colors, which is helpful for my students with low vision, and the acrylic dots made from the backs of pencils dipped in paint became tactile bumps once the paint dried. This project can be done in a period or two of art class, which meant there was plenty of time for discussion of symbolism in art, and how important it is to appreciate cultures other than our own.

 

Mosaics Project

We began our Art class unit about art around the world by studying Ancient Roman mosaics. Long before Italy was a country with Rome as a capital, it was part of a huge empire, extending into Africa and Great Britain. And the mosaics with intricate images made of thousands of tiny colored glass and ceramic tiles, like pixels. There were complex boarder patterns, intricate scenes from daily life. a wide range of value would give the illusion of space to images of people, animals, and still life objects. 

 My students chose from a variety of colored tiles in my room, put on a pair of safety glasses, and then took a hammer to the tile to break it into smaller pieces. Our classroom has an outdoor patio, where we could attack the tiles on bricks without having to worry about a big indoor mess. 

Students each drew a simple image onto a piece of wood, and then glued their tiles down with hot glue or hot glue. It helps to start with the big pieces and then fit smaller pieces into the remaining spaces. I bought a bag of sand grout, and half the bag ended up being enough for 15 mosaics of various sizes. We mixed a cup or two at a time, covering the top with a square of mat board, trying to "squeegee" it into all the cracks. After it sits long enough to harden, the excess on the top can wiped and polished up with a rag. Everyone was so excited to see how their projects turned out.