Textured Caulk Paintings

Last year's "caulk on canvas" assignment was such a success that we did it again, except we used latex and acrylic instead of liquid water color, and we created more textures with the wet caulk, rather than just lines. 

 It worked best a few minutes after dried a little on the canvas so it wasn't too sticky and then use back of spoons can create peaks, and combs create waves and lines. Strips of cardboard can push and swirl areas to give it enough tooth that a top coat of paint will stand out from an underpainting.

Mosts of the canvases were covered with spray paint for an even underpainting.The contrasting paint on the top layer gave it a richness that didn't exist when students just added paint to the plain white ground. 

The lines of caulk helped students who are blind feel the edges of shapes, when they were painting. And tactile paintings are always good to have on display at schools for the blind so they can be enjoyed by everyone.

 

Mixed Media Mania

 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.

Wire Quilt Squares Project

Our Wonder Women of Art unit has taken us to the Germany in the 1600's with Maria Sibylla Merian, to Mexico in the 1900's with Frida Kahlo, to the ladies living a state away in Alabama: The Quilters of Gees Bend. Self taught artists are still artists, and functional art is still art. This project is leading into a craft unit and we'll have to talk about the difference and overlap between art and craft. The Quilters in Gees bend are neighbors, family, and friends who made quilts out of necessity before they were discovered and made famous. Their fabric arrangements of colors and shapes hold their own in galleries of modernist paintings. So after watching videos and having discussions about the purpose and aesthetic of these famous quilts, we began to make our own squares. I offered my students wire, Twistees, pipe cleaners, beads, upholstery fabric, wall paper, buttons, wood and clay mosaic tiles.

Instead of making a large class quilt, students bound four of their own squares to make small 8"X8" wall hangings. One student (in the tradition of quilt making) made one for her future niece, who will be for next month. I love seeing how students use a variety of materials to fill an empty square.