Tactile Student Face Ornaments

December will be here before you know it, which means, it's time to design our Christmas tree for the Museum of Art and Science's Festival of Trees. I always try to use the tree as a way for my students to advocate or help the community understand them and their disability better. 

Every student at our school has an IEP, with their own goals and accommodations. We have students with a wide range of vision problems and eye diseases, causing everything from blurry vision  to no vision at all. Students cover the autism spectrum and a variety of other challenges. We have students as young as four and as old as twenty-one. Rather than look at them as a recipe of race, gender, age  and diagnosis, it's best to think of them as extremely complex and lovable individuals. I wanted the tree to express the rich texture of our student body, made up with beautifully unique individuals, each represented by a student-made, tactile cardboard portrait.

Check out the Festival of Trees at The Museum of Art and Science in Macon, Georgia from the 2nd week of December through the beginning of January.

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.

Caulk Painting

 Hammer and nails, drill and screws, and now caulk. We're exploring lots of media, tools, techniques, and procedures in Art this month.

Caulk is an especially effective thing to use to make drawings and paintings tactile for my visually impaired students.

I've noticed lots of problems in understanding how to make an effective composition, so I had to lay down some guidelines for this one. Each student had to fill the canvas by using large, medium and small shapes, coming in from the edges. Most students created eight to twelve shapes by overlapping some lines. 

Then they filled most of the shapes with a variety of textures by using the caulk to make dots, circles, spirals, dots and spirals. the next day we played around paints.

Some students used liquid watercolor to create a stained look.

Others used latex or acrylic to cover up any marker under drawing lines. Either way, students were happy with their two day tactile project.

Screw Art

To go with my theme of "building a great school year," I wanted to teach my students the kind of tools they can use for home improvement projects. Most schools have a core curriculum but students, who are blind, are required to learn an expanded core curriculum that may include Braille, orientation and mobility, cooking, or career exploration...every day living skills that most people learn through observation. I wanted to let my students use a drill to make holes or put screws into wood. Even if they never do it themselves, at least they all know what people are talking about when they reference drills and screws in the future.  For this project, they painted a piece of wood a solid color, painted a black shape on it (most students were thinking in terms of typography), fill the shape with holes, fill the holes with screws, and finally paint the screw heads. It's a simple concept: practice a skill and end up with a tactile piece of art that really pops.

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.

Yarn drawings

 

My art students at the Academy for the Blind moved beyond Wiki Stix for tactile drawing when we used the quilling technique, but using yarn or string to create drawings is more permanent than Wiki Stix and more immediate than quilling individual coils to create an image.  Students were open in terms of subject matter. Some students chose to make something abstract with squiggles and spirals. The important thing is for them to realize that they can make images that can be appreciated as a visual piece of art for those with vision and as a tactile piece of art for those without. It's a great project to teach types of lines, and weight of line as they choose thick or thin yarn (or both).

And for my student who recently discovered that art class can be used to make mazes, he could make them a variety of ways. It was fun to hear him laughing each time he figured out how to make a dead end to trick one of his class mates.

Tactile Art as Gift for Students with Visual Impairments

Shout out to Professor Richard Curtis, who recently had his Thomas College Art students figure out how to make tactile images for the blind. He sent a box to the Academy for the Blind, full of mini canvases filled with line art done in puffy paint, glitter glue, and sand as a gift for my students. The assignment was great lesson in line, texture, problem solving, and some of his students even bothered to learn how to spell some Braille words. My students loved choosing a tactile treasure to take home. 

 

Leaf Bowls

 

This is an easy and fun project the yields great results. My elementary school students went on a nature walk around campus with me. We felt bark, smelled pine needles, and picked a few large leaves off of the trees or the ground. Then we pressed the backs (veiny side) of the leaves into slabs of clay and traced them with a ceramic needle or knife. The leaf shapes were then placed on upside down metal mixing bowls to help them curve, and we used the score and slip technique to make a foot (either a coil in a ring, or three balls are the easiest). This lifts the leaf bowl off the surface and gives it a little shadow. These can be used for holding soap, earrings, keys, ear buds, or just as a stand alone decoration. I love how in just 30 minutes, my students are getting an interdisciplinary lesson that teaches them about autumn and types of trees, as well as techniques such as rolling a slab and correctly attaching pieces of clay.

Valentine Mosaics

 After a week of studying about ancient Greece, my class moved on to learn of Ancient Rome. Mosaics weren't invented in Greece or Rome but that's where they were perfected, and Rome is full of beautiful micro-mosaics that look almost like paintings. Rome was home of something else too: a saint named Valentine. As legend has it, he secretly performed weddings for Roman soldiers who were forbidden to marry, and for this he was put to death. Another story of perhaps another St. Valentine (It seems there were a couple martyrs with the same name) says that he visited downtrodden and mistreated Roman prisoners gifting cards... or that he was a prisoner who fell in love with a girl who visited him, maybe the jailor's daughter and that he signed a letter "From your Valentine." The Christian based holiday of St. Valentine's was a replacement for the Pagan mating rituals of February, Lupercalia. Roman's went people being killed for being Christian to being killed for not being Christian. Valentine's Day today has references to both Christianity and Pagan history: St. Valentine, who was a Catholic, the Greek god Eros, whose Roman name is Cupid, and his mother, the Greek goddess of Love, Aphrodite, whose Roman name is Venus, although I'm guessing most people aren't thinking about religion at all when they sign their Valentine's Day card.

To make our Valentine mosaics, my students used hearts that were cut from painted or colored mat board, a smaller heart was cut from within, and smaller pieces of half a small heart at a time were cut and glued. It's too hard to keep track of very many cut pieces at a time, so we focused on 4-8 at a time. The other small half and then the outer heart, half at a time were glued into place leaving little cracks. We talked about the idiom "broken heart" and played a game to try to see how many song titles we could name with the word "heart" in it. Normally, I'm not a fan using art class to make holiday crafts, but it fit so well with the curriculum of ancient cultures and art history that I couldn't resist.  A glued piece of ribbon on the back makes it easy to hang on a wall or on the door nob of a loved one as a gift. Love big everyone!

Mosaic Project

Student piece, titled "Toast"

I honestly don't know why I was so afraid to try this assignment. I put it off for years, having never made a mosaic before myself, but it turns out they are not very intimidating once you decide that doing it wrong is better than not doing it at all. I introduced my students to ancient mosaics from Greece and Pompei contrasting the difference between geometric and organic designs and making inferences about what life must have been like based on the images made of tiny tiles.

Some students used tiny mosaic tiles that they glued to wood or adhered with caulk. The caulk, when piped too thickly oozed out the sides of each thin tile, filling in the cracks as a messy, make-shift grout.

White grout provides high contrast for black tiled background and the greenish-gray number seventeen.

Older students put on eye protection and therapeutically hammered donated tiles into smaller pieces. Then they puzzled the shards together into shapes drawn onto wooden ovals and rectangles. Once each broken tile piece was adhered with tile glue, we let it set overnight before we began grouting. White, premixed grout was very easy to use. Since many of my students don't have any vision, they just used gloves and pushed it into cracks, trying to wipe the surfaces and polish the tiles almost immediately.

Gray, cement based grout was a little trickier since it had to be mixed in a 3 part powder to 1 part water mixture and used before it became too thick.  Dust masks are essential for this process. The texture wasn't nearly as pleasant to work with, but in the end, the gray, middle ground gave a really nice aesthetic. Most of the students who used white grout, later wished they had used gray.

Younger students used sticky backed craft foam, cut into squares and rectangles. These were arranged onto pieces of paper or painted cardboard.

foam "tiles" on painted cardboard bases make for a primer mosaic lesson.

A piece sign made from colored tiles glued to wood and filled with white grout, was much neater than using caulk

Whether you are doing a table top or stepping stones, mosaics are a great way to let yourself go to pieces and then pull it all together again.

Caulk and Cardboard

Our month long unit on low-relief sculpture included exposing the corrugation on spray painted cardboard, carving clay slabs, tooling foil, and casting plaster. I handed caulk guns to students who finished projects a day or two early, and they made images on cardboard. The caulk needs a couple of hours to dry before painting. They may not look amazing, but for students with no sight, it is how it feels that matters the most.

Embossing Foil

A flying pig embossed in foil

Repousse is a metal working technique in which thin metal or heavy foil is hammered or embossed on the back to make it stand out in the front. My students totally understand the idea of embossing as they use braillers to emboss paper all the time. They used plastic pencil-shaped tools to "tool" the foil and create a wide array of images as part of a low-relief sculpture unit.  Some students painted their images with black acrylic and then wiped it away to give it an aged, batik feel, some colored their image with markers and then gently wiped it away for a stained look, some did both. There's nothing quite like hearing kids who have never had vision, feel their artwork and say, "This looks great!"

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.

Cut-away Cardboard

For a fun and easy tactile project, students researched high contrast images online of the subject of their choice. Then they printed out a favorite, and cut away the darkest or the lightest areas. What remained was a spray paint stencil. If the light areas were removed, white spray paint on cardboard would replace those areas via the stencil. Some of the darkest areas, or just the back ground shapes, were outlined with an X-Acto knife and then the top layer of cardboard was peeled away, revealing the corrugation.

Some images were done by painting book board, and gluing parts of magazine pages onto the board before reusing the spray paint stencil. This wasn't as tactile, but still made for some interesting visual effects.

Tactile Graphics

Crayon pictures are great for kids with sight, but for the blind, tactile pictures make more sense. My elementary students recently used cardboard and Popsicle sticks to create a bus, a swimming pool, houses, dragon flies, a swing set, and more.
Teachers can help students with visual impairments find their way to the cafeteria by making them of the school with hot glue. Elephants, squids, and planets can be made into tactile graphics so that the students can get an idea of the shape of things that they can't see (even on TV or in magazines) or feel in real life.

Having students make their own images helps me to know what they understand and what they don't. And if there's some one on one time, it's an even better learning experience. "Did you know that houses often have peaked roofs?" or "Cars have four wheels, but there are two on each side, so how many wheels should we have on a side view of our car?"

These are also an excellent way for students to tell stories or to illustrate stories. They might talk about things that happened in their neighborhood, or an afternoon at an amusement park, complete with tactile roller coaster. And of course, the option of creating non-objective art should always be an option. There is something joyful about just putting shapes together.

Mosaics

Mosaics are pictures made from tiny tiles. Usually these are ceramic or glass squares. For my students, I cut up colored foam for an inexpensive alternative. Each student spray painted a piece of cardboard as a backing and used Elmer's glue to adhere the tiles.

This is a great project for children to gain fine motor skills and learn that many small things add up to make a big difference. There were some students who cut the foam in different sizes and shapes if they felt their image required it. And for students, who are blind, we left large spaces without tile, so that they would be able to feel the shape of the image without the confusion of having the background and foreground filled with texture. Maybe we'll try using ceramic tiles and grout in the future, but I found that this was a great way to introduce mosaics to children.