Analogous Painted Box Tactile Sculpture

 

What can you do with an old coffee table top and a bunch of tiny boxes handed to you in a garbage bag? Make a relief sculpture for a color theory lesson of course!

For this project, students painted the boxes on one side of the color wheel, ranging from pink to green. Students mixed yellow with the pink and yellow with some blue so that most of the colors were warm and cheerful.

Students needed vision to mix the colors but didn't need any vision to feel whether or not their box was covered with paint. We all worked together to finish 135 boxes in 9 rows of 15. The coffee table had a light spray paint coverage with blacks so that some of the old scratches were covered.

Then we used masking tape to make rows and light up the squares.

It was nothing short of a miracle that the width of the tape on each age, and a tape widths between each row and column worked out to fill the space exactly.  It was a real win for the power of eye-balling and guess work. We were just guessing how many boxes we'd need. It took two people to light up the ends of the tape on either side of a box. We didn't use rulers to measure, just the width of a box.

I glued the bottoms down with hot glue and now we have a tactile sculpture that we can use to discuss things like: rectilinear shapes, crystalographic balance, analogous color schemes, and high intensity. 

Analogous Rectilinear Cardboard Relief Art

I love using this cardboard relief assignment to teach how mixing two primaries makes a secondary, and that a primary and a secondary make a tertiary. So with just yellow and blue, you can not only get green, but all the yellow greens and blue greens, and they all look great together. Even children with multiple complex needs can choose which color and a shape to paint. After enough students painted enough pieces of cardboard, organized them from mostly blues at the top to mostly yellows at the bottom. I hot glued them into one giant rectangle of rectangular shapes. This lesson also reinforces the Principle of Design: UNITY, through the repetition of similar colors and shapes. Everyone contributes; everyone wins.

 

Relief Sculpture with Found Objects

Playing with blocks is one of the first ways a child learns to play and create. Architects and artists never outgrow the activity.  For our study of Louise Nevelson, I had my students create assemblage sculptures using found objects. Each student went "shopping" at my table full of wooden blocks, stretcher bars, popsicle sticks, and etc. They arranged their items in three different ways, documenting each one with a photograph so that they can discuss the strongest parts of each one and be more intentional with their arrangement before gluing it together.

Then they painted their sculpture a solid color. Some students chose one of Nevelson's preferences of either white or black, but others choose orange, purple, or blue.

A handful of students donated their piece to be part of a large collaborative sculpture. Arranging each individual relief sculpture into a larger structure and filling in the gaps in a way that created a unified piece was a lot of fun. We used wood glue for the small pieces and screwed large boards together. The finished piece was spray painted black, with some turquoise highlights to accentuate the shadows. It's nice to have a 4 foot sculpture that my blind students can experience through touch, that teaches about form, the use of tools (as part of our larger unit on building) and iconic sculptor, Louise Nevelson.

 

Carving Clay Slabs

Introducing students to relief sculpture is easy when you have a bunch of clay, a slab roller, and some carving tools.  It was just a matter of having them come up with ideas, and decided how much to take away. Carving is a subtractive process and future ceramic projects will be an additive process, so there is yin and yang in my curriculum throughout the school year.  Each student did some sketches. Rolled a slab, cut out the shape, and by the next day it was leather hard and ready to carve.






Once the pieces were fired and glazed, ribbons were tied through pre-made holes so that they could be hung on the wall. We had some trouble with our first glaze since the kiln didn't get hot enough.