I must say, it's hard to avoid the Yayoi Kusama dot pumpkin around the fall time. Searching for pumpkin-inspired art project ideas inevitably reveals this contemporary Japanese artist's dimensional, plump and somewhat psychodelic pumpkins. It's been done, again and again, but I felt it was now my turn... despite the hype. Kusama pumpkins White board instructions and guides, with teacher samples I love the graphic quality, and I particularly love the challenge of drawing contours without lines, by using only dots of various thickness. My kids classes (8-14 year olds) have varying degrees of experience with pen techniques since we did a few projects last year and in the last weeks involving stippling, hatching, and adding texture with pen. This no-lines drawing is not too far off, but definitely in a new direction, and I saw it as an extension of our previous illustration and pen work. Win win. Medium choice: I wanted the results to be super neat and crisp, like Kusama's own work. I knew painting dots with brushes would not give us that crisp quality, and I felt similarly about painting or drawing in the background pattern. So I opted for drawing in the dots with permanent black markers in various thickness, on colored paper. Pumpkins would be cut out and pasted on a background which was painted with a foam roller and stencil with black acrylic paint over top a vibrantly colored paper. With this approach we get the bright color of the pumpkins and the background, the neatly controlled lines of dots with the makers (that's the objective, after all), and the clean patterned background with the stencils. Process Day 1 1. Drawing pumpkins Student had visuals of Kusama's pumpkins as well as photos and illustrations of pumpkins to observe the variety of their form and shape. Simple step-by-step pumpkin drawing guides were also at their desk, so they could see how to break down and simply the drawing steps. I also demonstrated how to draw a pumpkin on the white board, and showed them several different options for shapes. Pumpkins are most easily drawn starting with the central 'section shape', them the section shape to the left and the right, and so on. The stem is drawn slightly tucked down into the top, so is doesn't look like it's sitting on the top contour edge, but rather growing out the pumpkin. Students were encourage to try a few different shapes - tilted, plump, oblong and even with wavy sections.... like Kusama's. We practiced a few rounds of pumpkins on scratch paper. Then we chose our colored paper, and began drawing our favorite version in pencil. 2. Dots Each pumpkin section must be filled with dots in a crisp, systematic fashion. Our dots must create the illusion of form. We analyzed Kusama's work and noted how she uses a row of larger dots at the center of her central section, with increasingly smaller rows of dots on both sides. This gives our section a 3-D shape. The tricky part is addressing the next sections to the left and the right. We noted that Kusama uses large semi-circle, or half-dots, along the outer edge of the first section (where we drew our section line with pencil). From there, the lines of dots get increasingly smaller again toward the other edge. This is repeated for each section. The darker intensity of the large half-dots serves the purpose of creating a strong visual line which separates the sections (thereby replacing our 'line' with 'dots'). *Super important for an effective gradient of dot sizes is using differently sized markers. We used permanent markers with hefty fat tips, medium tips (or a sharpie with a good point) and fine liners in various tops. 3. Stem We observed that Kusama did her stem in the same manner, but in the inverse. So dots are white, and the negative space is black. To achieve this effect, we simply drew open circles with our black pen, and colored the space around our white circles. Pencil lines were erased and pumpkins were cut out. We managed all this in a 90 minutes class. Drawing dots Drawing dots Day 1 results Day 1 results Day 2 Background: Student chose a colored paper that complemented or contrasted with their pumpkin color. Then they chose the stencil of their choice. My stencils are from Marabu. We chose stencils that contrast the dot pattern, so those with a different angular of liner quality. We did not, for examaple, use the stencils with hearts, small stars, circles, etc. because they are visually too similar to our dots. We used black acrylic paint and foam rollers to stencil on our colored paper. In many cases, our stencils were not as large as our paper, so we had to carefully reposition the stencil, lining up the stencil with the printed edge, and rolling again to fill the page. Pumpkins were finally pasted on the printed background, for a visually exciting result. My students were quite wowed by their vibrant, dimensional results, and proud of their hard work and dedication to neatness and precision. Hard work pays off. Ages 8-14 Ages 8-10
A couple of weeks ago I saw an activity like this one on Pinterest which gave me the inspiration to do my own version. So here it is. Totally FREE 🙂 If you are searching for a back to school activity, you are gonna love this one! You know what, our 4th graders loved this activity. […]
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Since I've spent the last couple of weeks in Printmaking Land with my second and third graders, I thought I'd share everything I know about printmaking in the elementary art room! I started to record a podcast episode which quickly turned into TWO podcast episodes. There's a lot to printmaking in the elementary art room but none of it is scary, difficult or even all that messy! My kids love it and so do I. So I'll be sharing both podcast episodes here as well as my favorite lessons. Be sure and click the link as it will take you directly to the lessons which often feature a video for you and your students! In the first episode in this series, I focus a lot on printing with Styrofoam sheets. They are a great alternative to having small children carve into linoleum or wood blocks (lord, I can see the lawsuit now!) and can produce beautiful results. Here's everything I could think of about printing with Styrofoam sheets! My favorite tip is to have kids use ink pens when incising the lines into the foam. I have them use a blue pen first and a black pen second. This ensures that they'll incise the lines deeply enough by doing it twice. When I see the black ink pen, I know they've traced their lines not once but twice. In this episode, I talk a lot about supplies and set up. Here's a visual! My second graders are doing a rainbow roll in this photo. Notice the dollops of ink at the top of the tray where they are to dip their brayer, not roll through the ink. Then, in the space below, they are to roll their brayer up and down only (so as not to mix the colors) to cover the brayer before rolling it onto their printing plate. Messy mats are used to help keep the table clean. Students also place all of their prints on the messy mat during clean up (without stacking them as they will stick together) and slide the entire mat onto our drying rack. Then we toss our printing plates in one sink, brayers and trays in another for me to do a quick wash after school. In the episode, I also mention printing on newspapers, painted papers, wrapping paper, metallic papers and much more. The results are stunning! In the follow-up episode, I talk about printing in 30-minute classes. On the first day, we do a single color print like these third-grade robots you see here. The following art class, we do a rainbow roll like you saw above. On our third day of printing, we spend a hot minute adding more designs to our printing plates before doing a reduction print. The kids were fascinated by this process. And on the last day, we make these! Never throw away those printing plates or simply send them home. You can make such cool works of art with them with inexpensive foil sheets, steel wool and spray paint. Take a listen to find out how! Third Grade Cities! This lesson was a hit as the kids were allowed to swap cities to create some diversity in their finished piece. The complete lesson in the link! Winter Portraits by Second Grade Need a fun way to introduce printmaking and patterns? Check out this self-portrait project! Egyptian God Portraits Fourth grade students used their knowledge of Egyptian gods and symbols to print the designs in the background of these portraits. Positive Four Letter Word Collages with Prints! This is a lesson I return to year after year and seem to change and tweek each time. You can see alternatives to this lesson here. Gelatin Prints I don't do this kind of printing anymore with homemade gelatin printing plates for a couple of reasons: I don't like using the gelatin (it's an animal product that I'm not comfortable using) and it's labor-intensive. BUT the results! There are recipes for making your own more permanent printing plates that don't seem to be difficult at all. I found several on YouTube. Sushi Collage with Gelli-Plate Prints I do have a class set of Gelli-Plates and we love them. The best thing to do is just let your kids go crazy exploring different methods of printing on the surface with stencils and texture and color. In the end, you'll have a fun stack of papers like you see below that can then be used to create collages like you see above! If you would like a video to walk you through more of these processes, be sure and check out this blog post! Collagraph Prints are ones created by adding things to a surface. This is different that the Styrofoam prints which are a subtractive kind of printing. Collagraphs are additive. My fourth graders created these prints a couple years ago in celebration of dot day! That project was very similar to one I did just last year with my kindergarten friends! We used foam hearts from the Dollar Tree as the base and sticky-backed foam stickers for the design. You can see the complete lesson here. We collaged our completed hearts for these sweet masterpieces. We then wrapped our lesson by wrapping our hearts and doing a little burnishing as I mentioned at the start of this blog post! I hope that gives you a bunch of ideas for printmaking in your art room and removes any fear that you may have! Happy Printing!
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Vislasagne - Verrassend eenvoudig en toch lekker anders. Bovendien kan je deze lekkere maaltijd makkelijk op voorhand klaarmaken.
You can find all my items by searching “ PV ” in game Enjoy ☺ PATREON Follow at https://www.instagram.com/pixelvibessims
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