Warm and Cool Cardboard Assemblage

My self-contained classes have been learning about warm colors vs. cool colors. One week, each student painted a piece of cardboard with warm colors and the next week they did the same thing with cool colors. I strung fishing wire through the corrugations and ended up with some nice hanging collaborate art pieces to brighten the walls of the school.

Crystalographic Balance Project

Our Art class unit on visual balance has included projects for symmetry, asymmetry, and radial balance. During week four we learned about crystallographic balance by studying the works of Andy Warhol. Andy was a boy from Pittsburg who ate a lot of Campbell's Soup. He believed that art could be produced for the masses without compromising quality. He took Pop Art up a notch or two when he started wearing a gray wig (in his 20's), called his his studio a factory, and made a movie of himself eating a hamburger. His iconic Campbell's Soup can paintings in 1962 were hung on a grid. His screen prints of popular icons such as Marylin Monroe or Liz Taylor, were often printed on a grid. This grid type composition is how crystallographic balance is created. It is like a tessellation or wall paper and can go on and on, the same way crystals grow.

I had my students use the iconic pop artist's medium of screen printing as well as one of his compositional devices.

Some students chose to print out faces of people found on the internet. These were cut to make paper stencils for the screen.

Others created their own shapes to print a shape several times before making a different shape for the next run of color.

One student, during a slide show, saw a painting by Juan Miro, pointed to the Calder-style mobiles hanging above us, and said, "Hey that looks like those!" That was the first time that I had noticed the relationship between the two artist's styles. Before a couple of weeks ago, I didn't even know the two of them were friends. Some of my students chose to borrow Miro's whimsical and organic style of crystallographic balance, and use lines and symbols to tie the shapes together.

This type of project is easiest when done in small groups of people who share the same ink color for each run. But even with my small classes, it was driven home that there are many ways to find balance in a work of art.

Autumn Paper Mural

Fall doesn't feel like fall with out golds and rusts to help us enjoy the transition. To introduce my lower functioning students to the concept of warm and cool colors I tied it into seasonal changes. Ginko trees turn yellow, maples turn red, and magnolia trees stay green. Students each made a couple of trees by coloring and stamping warm colored  paper, which was cut into simplified tree shapes.  Glue sticks turned paper into collages. Each student made one tree to take home and another to contribute to the giant banners that were laminated just in time to welcome the first day of Autumn.

Radial Balance

Our unit on Visual Balance in Art has continued as my students learned about radial balance by creating mandalas.

Radial balance is similar to symmetrical balance in that if you fold the composition in half, it will be the same on both sides. The difference is that you could fold it vertically, horizontally, or diagonally, and it will always be about the same. A daisy or a bicycle wheel are great examples of radial balance. So are mandalas (Sandskrit for circles), which represent a wholeness such as the universe.

I shared a video of Buddhist monks creating mandalas to my students. It is a tedious, time and labor intensive task to create a beautiful mandala from colored sand, only to have it brushed away.  Why did they make it?  Before even watching a video, I ask my students why anyone makes art. Student answers included that it is fun, or because artists want to make money or become famous. Some talked about self expression or leaving something behind for posterity. But none of these answers apply when it comes to Buddhist monks making sand mandalas. These monks believe that the act of making the mandala actually changes them. They are inviting various Buddhas to come and exist within the mandala during the days of its creation, and that by the meditative process of creating that those involved will gain greater compassion for example. They are learning precision and gaining stamina. After it is completed, the sand is brushed away, teaching the impermanence of things and the importance of appreciating life in the moment.

Certainly, art has changed me. Art requires patience and the courage to take risks. The qualities acquired through art making can spill into other areas of life.

To make their mandalas, my students took pieces of card stock, made a square, and folded it diagonally, in both directions to make an X, and then folded it horizontally and vertically, so that there were four folds intersecting at the center to make 8 divisions. They used a compass and scissors to make a circle, and then a piece of pie shaped paper to fit into an 8th of their circle. They drew a pattern which was then traced on a light table on window, flipping the image each time. In other words, every other pie shape had the image facing right, and the remaining spaces had the image facing left. For those who were blind, I traced the template they drew, for them, first in Sharpie and then in hot glue. They were responsible for coloring the tactile shapes with colored pencil or marker.

Finally, some of the shapes were filled in with glue and sprinkled with color sand, not only to reference the Buddhist sand mandalas, but to create a more interesting tactile effect. When I heard complaints about the physical discomfort from leaning over a light table, or the frustration of having to start over when huge mistakes were made, I would remind them of the days or weeks of back breaking work for the monks to make theirs. Everything worthwhile requires sacrifice of one sort or another. And once the projects were completed, all of the reasons for complaining had been forgotten, for the joy of having made something come into existence that wasn't there before.

Picasso faces

When you have students with multiple complex needs, sometimes, the learning target is as simple as helping a child realize that faces are symmetrical. I try to spice lessons up with stories from art history, such as relating last week's wire faces to Calder's wire portraits. This week's review of the lesson's learning target "understanding that faces are symmetrical" included background in Picasso's dis-proportioned faces inspired by African masks. I had a little "shop" where students could pick out pre-cut cardboard head shapes and face parts, but my higher functioning students were able to create their own shapes from cardboard.  Students chose colors and painted each shape before arranging them to glue together.

I found out at the last minute that the state education offices at the capitol were looking for student artwork, about the constitution, to display.  Of course we'd talked about the importance of the balance of government in our first lesson on balance, but there was no time to have students make artwork specifically about the constitution, so I took all of these cardboard faces, with their Picasso eyes and Muppet toned skins and made a collaborate piece entitled WE THE PEOPLE.  Any quirkiness, impairments and disabilities my students have certainly does not prevent them from being one of the people, for whom the constitution was written.

Calder Art Lesson Plan

When you walk into the National Gallery in Washington D.C., one of the first things you will see is a giant black and red mobile created by Alexander (Sandy) Calder. His father, like him, was a sculpture with the name of Alexander Calder. And his grandfather, the first of the three sculptors named Alexander, immigrated from Scotland and settled in Philly where his large William Penn statue stands on city hall's dome today.

Sandy Alexander went to Paris in the 1920's, where he became known as the King of Wire for his wire circus performers and faces. These were the inspiration for my students wire face creations (above).

He later created the mobile, hanging kinetic sculptures. The term mobile was given to Calder's work by avante guard artist and friend, Marcel DuChamp.  Another art legend, Piet Mondrian, in 1930 proved to be a huge influence on Calder's work, which began to incorporate, reduced, simplified forms, and a limited pallet.

In order to help my students make the step from symmetrical balance, to asymmetrical balance, they were each required to make a mobile. This exercise requires attention to actual weight and balance (not just visual weight and balance).

Some students used only circles, while others used a variety of shapes. Some used card stock, while others used tooled foil, cardboard, or mat board. These materials were colored with markers or spray paint and attached using wire, paperclips, or pipe cleaners.

Back on the Bus Y'all Art Project

My art class didn't waste any time getting back into the art making mode this school year. In fact, the first week, we made bus safety posters for a contest. 

Students were invited to use marker, colored pencil, watercolor or acrylic.

I am always amazed at the range of abilities my students have. About half have some sight and half have none. Their cognitive abilities are varied as well. I am thrilled when I find a student who can understand concepts such as two-point perspective.

But my heart skips a beat when someone uses their unique twist, by adding things such as the interior aisle on the outside of the bus, or representing a wheel chair lift as a blue circle. This student used Wiki-stix to provide tactile lines for the paint. I had challenged my students to consider a different point of view, but most of my students drew the side view of the bus facing right. I can't blame them though, that's exactly what they see when they get on and off the bus each day.