Wooden Sculptures

Every little kid should have a chance to play with building blocks and popsicle sticks. This is all we did for our first few days of "wood sculpture" week. Actually, I did show my art students a few videos of people carving wood to discuss the difference between additive and subtractive processes, but basically it was a matter of coming up with as many possible solutions to what they could do with a few boxes of wooden things before settling on a design and gluing the pieces together.

I started teaching sculpture with a  month of relief sculpture projects, because my students with visual impairments are used to Braille and tactile images in their day to day life.  Of course they live in a three dimensional world, so sculpture in the round shouldn't be a stretch, but it is a little hard for some of them to understand that an artist must consider how their sculptures look from the front, back, both sides, and sometimes from the top or bottom. Some had trouble getting past the flat surface, but it was still good for them to have a chance to explore with wood.