When you let students with little to no vision make art, there's no telling what you'll get. I found a bunch of old prints of masterpieces being thrown away and I quickly grabbed them, thinking that little help from a master can never hurt.
These prints were used as a starting point in our discussion about media. We made a huge list of types of media, both two and three dimensional and put it all into a mind-map poster.
I offered students a huge range of things for them to use to collage, draw, paint, and manipulate the image of their choice. It's a fun project to learn about the history appropriation as well, but mostly we wanted to play with materials.
Mixed media assignments are crowd pleasers with build-in differentiation.
