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.

 

Spring Art for kids

 

Spring has sprung with lots of kid centered crafts that have to do with blossoms, eggs, caterpillars and butterflies.

I have a student who is OBSESSED with caterpillars and butterflies. when I saw this crawling caterpillar Tick Tock video, I knew I had to have his class make this paper toy. Instead of toilet paper, we wrapped crepe paper around a pencil and glued the edges together before scrunching it off  to make the  wrinkled caterpillars. Contruction paper. cut and folded, with a little loop glued to he end, was made before adding a rolled up piece of green paper (glued to keep it place) slid into the loop for a stem. One end of the caterpillar is glued to the loop and another to the end of the stem that is towards the middle of the leaf. By pulling the stem back and forward, it looks like the caterpillar is inching itself forward.

The following class period, we made more paper leaves with butterflies of tissue paper wings and pipe cleaner bodies. This is a science lesson, in talking about how caterpillars build a cacoon and turn into butterflies, but it was also a literacy lesson since we read, "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" during class.

We also made 3D cherry blossom art, tissue paper flowers and died Easter Eggs, but anything painted in spring-time colors can be a spring project, including a relief sculpture, clay rattles, or playful prints with foam stamps or rollers.

It's fun to have bright and cheerful things to look at inside, after coming in from seeing bright and cheerful things happening in the natural world, during spring.

Printmaking and Leaves

Autumn is the perfect time to do a cross curriculum lesson by marrying printmaking and leaves.  I began the lesson with a 5 minute video about why leaves fall from the trees as the days get shorter in the fall (hint, it has to do with chlorophyll and photosynthesis). Then we took a hike around campus, touching bark, identifying the trees and collecting leaves and pinecones as we went.  

Our first art assignment, used the leaves we collected to make rubbings. The students would arrange their leaf or leaves with the vein sides up, lay a piece of copy paper or newsprint on top and rub the paper with the side of a crayon to reveal the texture and shape of the leaf. Rubbings are a simple form of printmaking and most households have all the supplies on hand. 

The second project was to make leaf prints by painting with tempera or acrylic on the vein side of leaves and then turn the leaf upside down and rolling it with a brayer or rolling pin. You have to be careful not to get uneven pressure through things like finger prints and it helps to place a piece of paper on top of the leaf as well to keep the roller clean. The same leaf can be used multiple times, although if more paint needs to be applied, use it sparingly so as not to fill in all of the gaps between the veins.

Finally we used stencils of various leaf shapes. Students placed a sponge in yellow paint to pat lightly, covering the exposed shapes. A sponge with blue paint dabbed around the edges creates green, and red paint sponged on the wet yellow creates orange. So students are learning leaf identification (biology), mixing of primary colors to create a secondary, (color theory), shape and texture (elements of design), and three different printmaking techniques (techniques and processes), in 3 hours of Art class.

Help the children in your life slow down and enjoy their fall through art making!

Color Field Painting Lesson

Happiness happens when, during a monthly Skype with your sister, who is an Art History professor, you tell her that you "taught Helen Frankenthaler last week" and she says, "I did too!"  Frankenthaler was a second generation color field painter and abstract expressionist, who exhibited her art for the six decades before her death in 2011. She was inspired by Jackson Pollock's drip paintings in that she moved her canvases to the floor, but rather than dribble and throw paint from a brush, she poured diluted paint onto linen canvases, creating a stain soak technique.  She would manipulate the puddles of paint by lifting the corners of the canvas, or pushing it gently with sponges and squeegees attached to long sticks.  I think I remember hearing that Robert Motherwell (who was her husband for thirteen years) also created mop-like brushes for his large paintings. Morris Lewis followed Frankenthaler's lead in creating images from overlapping areas of soaked color.

My students took this inspiration and ran with it to make their own, large and small color field paintings.  We used watercolor rather than thinned oil or acrylic, but there's still a similarity in terms of aesthetics and a new appreciation for color just for the sake of color.

For a fascinating look at the science behind color, take a listen at one of the most popular Radio Lab episodes ever:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRD22dY5lck

Dot painting

The Aborigines of Australia are such an amazing people, and most of my students had never heard of them before this week. We started Monday with a documentary to help them understand the significance behind some Aboriginal customs and ancient art. Accordingly, we began our own dot paintings.

The Aborigines have symbols that communicate meaning in their art. A single arch symbolizes a person, concentric circles are a symbol for water hole, diagonal lines represent rain, and arrows can be spears or emus. Acrylic dot paintings became popular in 1960's, but dots are used to create ancient rock art as well.

A lot of students chose to use black or another dark color as a background to provide contrast for the lighter colors. We dipped unused pencil erasers into house paint to make the dots.

The student who made this painting has prosthetic eyes. The latex paint dots and puddles were somewhat tactile. When she felt her painting the next day she said, "Oooooo. This is really nice!"

Because these paintings didn't take very long, we continued making dot paintings with dot makers and puff paint. This project was a really fun way to bridge ancient and contemporary non-objective art.