Painting Ceramic Houses

I thought I'd share how my students' clay houses looked after they'd been fired and painted with acrylics.

Painting the stones on this house only took a couple of class periods. Not bad considering that it is about 17 inches wide and all four sides needed to look similar.  

The bisque firing was perfect for a brick red color which meant some students only needed to paint the roof and trim. Spray paint was used for the barn roof to make it look metallic.

Of course one student opted to leave the roof unpainted, which is perfect for terra-cotta tile.

 This house belongs to a student who is entirely blind, so I had to tape out everything in the front of the house but the door, when it came time for him to use red.  I love his large stones.

Now go make something out of clay to paint and love forever.

Fabric Drawings to Teach Value

If fabric studies were good enough for Leonardo DaVinci to do in the Renaissance, they're good enough for me to do in the classroom. The use of lights and darks, value, is required to draw fabric in a way that looks three dimensional. The deeper the fold in the fabric, the darker the value on the drawing.
In this drawing Leonardo uses a middle ground and saved the lightest value for the highlights.

Below are some examples of work from my students, who are visually impaired. A couple of them had to sit very close to the still life; others, had to take a picture to print or view on an iPad just a few inches from their face.

Here is the work of a student with even less vision. There are no specifics when it comes to value and fabric folds in this drawing.

Students with no vision would feel the still life, and I would help them mimic the folds in the fabric with wiki sticks, which they would then use as guidelines when adding the value.

Toilet Paper Roll Crafts

Empty toilet paper tubes are easily accessible and accumulate quickly with the help of school custodians and parents. Here are a few projects we did in my art class recently, using those tubes.

Relief Art

We cut each cardboard tube into 4 or 5 rings. Then we painted, arranged and hot glued them together to form several pieces of wall art. From a distance it looks like metal. I was more involved with this project since most of my students can't use a hot glue gun safely, but everyone kept busy with our collaborative projects and a few made their own ornaments and wreathes.

Tube Owls

These owls took about 30 minutes to make. I offered googly eyes and feathers, but most students chose to use markers and construction paper, with charming results.

Pattern Prints

The ends of tubes can be dipped in paint and stamped on paper to create circles. If those ends are cut with slits or triangles and fanned out, flower or star shapes are created. Tubes can be folded into triangles or squares as well. Since the tubes were free, there's nothing to loose with a little experimenting. Stamping is a form of printmaking and pattern/repetition is a principle of design, so we're covering the art standards in a way that is fun.