Plaster Cast Relief Sculptures

Casting plaster is a fun way to learn about bas relief sculptures. For this project, I took my students on a little walk around our school campus to find leaves and flowers. 

Then we rolled out a slab of clay, preferably not terracotta, arranged some plants on top of it, and rollecd it again to press the plants into the clay. The ones with needles worked best: rosemary, cyprus, etc. Picking all the little plant parts can be hard, but it's best to start with the stem and then pleal it back gently.

I made shallow boxes of mat in standard frame sizes: 5"X7", 6"X8", 8"X10". The boxes only had to be about 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch deep to allow for a 1/4" thick slab and plaster. Once I put the clay in the bottom of the box, I tapped up the corners. Students mixed plaster powder with water and once it was the consistency of pancake powder, they poured it into the box, on top of the clay. We pealed the box away from the clay/ plaster layers and then pealed the clay away from the plaster. The plaster is strong enough to rinse off some of the mis-color, and even some gentle rubbing with a paint brush under the stream of water.

For any Print or Braille words, it is important to write (carve or emboss) everything into the clay in reverse. The plaster will be a mirror image of the clay. So mind your P's and Q's. 

For students who wanted to add a little color, they could use water color pencils. Everyone was amazed at how clear and accurate the casting was. The details are wonderful and the finished product is one everyone "felt" great about.

 

Plaster Word Art

 Dick Blick offers a Topographical Typograhy lesson that I was happy to try out for our relief sculpture unit. My students who are Braille readers, don't spend much time thinking about how fonts each have their own vibe. But even blind kids can grasp the idea that text for a five year old birthday card, requires playful letters whereas, a wedding announcement might ask for elegant lettering. Now what that means can be different, but rounded letters are less serious than sharp edged letters. Calligraphic texts with the slanted letters and varied weight of line harkens to romance or tradition. So students began this assignment by picking a word and a style for their type.

My students wrote and  transfered their best idea to a piece of mat board using pencil, marker, or Wiki Sticks depending on their vision. Then they taped 1/2 strips of white posterboard on it's edge to follow their lines. The following day, a lot of the tape had curled up so I started hot gluing it for them the day they tacked it down with fewer pieces of tape. 

Then they took pieces of plaster cloth and dipped it in a bowl of water for just a second or two, smoothed out with a couple of fingers in the air to fill in some of the holes in the guaze-y fabric. Then draped it over the raised lines and smoothed it down. 

Some students stuck to an initial or two.

A couple Braille readers opted to make just one initial or a simple picture, since they don't read print at all. I was okay with that since a picture is worth a thousand words. Ultimately we were able to do 15 small projects (5" X 8" to 8" X 10" ) with a 5" wide X 3 yard strip  plaster fabric. Some students used watercolor pencils and some used spray paint to finish up the surface, but I liked the white, unfinished surface. It's a fun project that can be done somewhere between 15 minutes and 3 hours depending on how elaborate you want to get.

Foil Paper and Oil Pastel Project

The reviews are in: foil paper is really fun to use in collage. For this mixed media assignment, students drew an image of a landscape, still life or animal onto a piece of mat board. Then they colored the image by cutting and tearing pieces of foil paper to collage each area. They used the same tools that we used to emboss foil (for the previous assignment) to scratch texture and designs onto parts of their picture.

Finally, oil pastel was added to create contrast. The scratch lines would maintain the shine, or at times, some of the oil pastel was scraped back, pushing the color into the scratch marks. Students with low vision used magnification devices, and those who were etotally blind, used hot glue or Wiki Stix for tactile edges of shapes. The smooth and shiny surfaces added a "wow" factor to what could have a picture done in crayon or marker, and I think all of my students enjoyed the process.

 

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.

Summer trip Art Stops

 Art museums are always a treat for me when traveling. I plan my summer road trips based on family members who I want to re-visit, and national parks I haven't yet visited. Then I look at the closest art museums I can stop and see in route for a perfectly balanced vacation experience. 

This summer my family drove from my sister's house (in the middle of Kansas) and my in-law's house (in norther Illinois) by breaking up the 10 hours into two half days of driving. This  allowed for Art Experiences in Kansas City and Des Moines, both of which have stellar, and free art museums!

The Nelson-Atkins has 35,000 works of art that attract half a million visitors every year. It opened in 1933 and was financially stable enough (thanks to the two founders who left their fortunes to a trust for the museum in their will) that they were able to buy up much of the artwork from other museums who were needing to sell in order to raise funds and stay afloat.

There's a nice collection of Impressionist Art, Midevil, Greece, and Egyptian treasures. There's also modern and special exhibits. I was thrilled to see the Andy Goldsworthy stone wall that meanders in and outdoors, and of course, the iconic Shuttlecock sculptures by Claus Oldernberg surrounding the museum. Don't miss the Gates of Paradise upstairs, around the corner from the café. There were no lines and crowds there like the ones in Florence Italy.

We spent a few hours at the museum and didn't see everything. We'd stopped for lunch at Woodyard BBQ before coming, which satisfied our physical appetite, before all those tasty treats for our eyes!

The Des Moines Art Center was really fun morning stop. Firelei Báez is a contemporary artist who was having an enormous exhibition filling several galleries.

But the center also had some really strong modern art like Hopper, and there were Diebenkorn etchings and paintings skattered throughout. 

Lunch at the Manhatten Deli was the best! It is just a few blocks from the Art Center. Good luck finding a parking spot if you are going at noon, but you only need to wait a New York minute for your tasty Des Moines sandwhich.

Lynden Sculpture Garden is in norther Milwaukee and contains over 50 large sculptures among a beautiful landscaple.

They have an indoor gallery that had a photography exhibit when we were there, but obviously most of is is outside: a prairie area, a garden, a couple ponds, and a collection of Bonzai trees. My favorites included a Henry Moore and the Deborah Butterfield horse. Summer was a little hot in the afternoon, but I imagine it being a great place for spring or summer picnics, walks, or photoshoots.

After camping and hiking on the Upper Peninsula and spending a day on Mackinaw Island the family was ready to come down the the other side of Lake Michigan until we ended up at the Ann Arbor Art Fair. I had no idea is was such a big deal! 30 city blocks and 1,000 venders! Lunch at Zingerman's Deli made for a perfect afternoon with the family.

Don't ever think you have to go to the coasts to see amazing art. After all,  I just had 4 fun and free art stops in 4 mid-western states!

Summer time is always a great time to find art wherever you find yourself!

Summer Camp Survivor Medialions & Fishing Field Trip

My summer program students each made a necklace with a medallion they made from clay. They rolled out slabs, cut shapes, pressed textures or drew pictures.

And after a day (we set them in the sun for a few hours), they had become bone dry and so I fired them in the kiln for them to paint. Because most people didn't spend an hour making their medalion, there was lots of time just to play with the clay. No summer should be without a little play.

Other parts of our summer program included, fire building, setting up a tent, swimming and making team flag. One of our field trips was to a fishing education center called, Go Fish, in Perry Georgia. Students were able to practice tying knots, and fish on fishing simulators.

Then they fed fish in the aquariums.

They even caught a few fish of their own! It was fun day, a fun week, and a great way to way to start summer!

Paracord Bracelets

Because the theme of our summer camp was, "Survivor," I decided to teach my students how to make paracord bracelets. Rope or cord is something that comes in handy in emergency situations, to build a tent, hang wet clothes to dry, repel, or create a sling or sprint when someone gets injured on the trail.

And a bonus is that macramé knots can be learned by my campers who are blind or at least visually impaired.

I bought a kit with enough cord and clasps for 50 kids and it ended up being less than a dollar per bracelet.

We started with a long cord, folded in half, with the fold pushed into the hole in the buckle/ clasp. The two ends are pulled through the looop.

 It should look like this, once cinched.

Then the ends are pushed through the hole ont he other side of the buckle. Try to keep the cords parallel  untwisted. You can measure your wrist to see how much to allow through, or you can just try it on your wrist and adjust it, leaving a little room for the extra cords. I left 7 inches in the loop for my bracelet.

And then you start the process of tying knots to hold the appropriate length in place. You'll want to make the knots alternating left and right so that it will lay flat. Otherwise, you'll get a twist, which is great for things like hemp necklaces with little seashells, but too bulky for this project.

I started on the right, making a letter "P" by having the right cord loop to the right side and overlapping the two cords in the middle. The left cord lays on top on the crossing down on the left side of the two center cords.

Then the left cord goes behind the two center cords and pushes up and out of the right loop in the letter "P."  This looks a little like and upside down pretzel.

Once each of the two cords are pulled snug and slide up, you'll make the same knot on the left side. A backward "P" looks like a number 4. You make the loop by placing the left cord across the center cords at a 90 degree angle. Then the right side goes over the top of that cord, behind the center cords and up and through the loop. Pull both sides until the knot is complete. It's basically a square knot. with the right over left, left over right, pattern, except that the knot is tied around the two center cords.

When you get to the end, you cut off all the extra cord and then singe the ends to keep from fraying.