Dog Relief Sculpture, Wall Art

DisneyPlus has show, Critter Fixers: Country Vets, which is filmed in Georgia not far from The Academy for the Blind. In fact, we had some students do some work-based-learning with them on a regular basis last school year, culminating in a school assembly Q&A session with the Critter Fixers stars, Dr. Hodges and Dr. Ferguson. Students were able to walk to different stations on campus, petting various animals and listening to their heartbeat through a stethoscope. It was a great day and we all looked forward to seeing the episode when it came out.

Months later, the show's producer came back and, during a tour of the school, stopped by the Art room and mentioned how nice it would be to have a piece of student artwork on a wall of Critter Fixers. Immediately, the parent mentor, who was giving the tour, mentioned Kirby, as a subject. Kirby is the school's emotional support dog. Minutes after they left, I started looking for pictures of the black Labrador Retriever. Students helped me pick a couple of my sketches, and then they traced the projections onto a large piece of paper to use as patterns.  I used the patterns to cut out layers of cardboard, glued together to make a thick structure. 

Two Middle School students made more rubbings with oil pastels on black paper, based on the past assignment, which they decoupaged onto the structures.  To make the relief structures into something that could be hung on the wall, I had made two holes through two layers of cardboard to thread wire through before adding a top layer of the body.

Pattern Rubbings

Stencils are an easy way to create images for people who are blind, but rubbings are another easy form of printmaking that can yield some interesting results. Since we're learning about Principles of design, we used this assignment to talk about pattern and balance, while learning the process and technique of crayon rubbings.

I was was given some really neat tactile mazes, that are used to help beginning Braille students learn now to move their fingers to track lines. While I have students who are fluent Braille readers and some who are just starting, it was a fun activity for everyone to try to navigate their fingers through the mazes.

Then we placed paper on top of the favorite shapes and patterned sheets before rubbling  on the paper and revealing the image. Most of the younger students needed the paper taped to the plastic sheet to prevent it from moving, but we also found that shifting the sheets, or using several different patterned sheets to create a single image made it all the more interesting. Changing colors for each sheet, or even within a single layer added to the complexity. Students peeled the paper from crayons and held them on their side, pushing the crayon perpendicular to the lines that they were tracing.  Oil pastels worked better than crayon on black paper.

I had a few students who just wanted to use one plate to rub, which was essentially copying an image. I told them that it was the combination that made it their own artwork. You take a cookie and you take chocolate chunks and the combination makes a new invention: the chocolate chip cookie. Their job was to make something that hadn't been made before by choosing colors, placement and combinations, not just replicate something that someone else had already made. Some classes also went around the school on texture scavenger hunts, making rubbings of any surface that would make a good rubbing.  Its a fun and quick project that can produce some interesting images.