Tactile Caulk Painting project

To wrap up our relief sculpture unit, I had student's create tactile images by using caulk on canvas or wood. Many of them started with a drawing in marker or Wiki-Stix, if the students were totally blind. Then these were traced using caulk from the hardware store. Once the paint was dried, Under paintings were completed and by the 3rd day my students were able to paint work on the top layer of their painting.

Some students placed their canvas on the potter's wheel and squirted the caulk down onto the base. By touching the tip of the caulk gun to the surface, there was more of a mechanical feel, where as just squirting it from the air, felt more organic. The colors reflect the nature of the line. 

Some students used masonite (the back of scraps of bead board from a home improvement project to be specific), and used spray paint for their under painting.

The tactile quality allowed for my blind students to feel where to paint. Because this spider web was black, my student spray painted the entire image black, and then filled in the negative space with white, so the black lines would feel more like the foreground. She finger painted acrylic, dripping tiny strands as she went. There was not a single student who wasn't happy with their finished painting.

 

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.