Skip to main content

Weaving with Monotypes

I have been doing a lot of clay and other messy projects lately, so I thought what better than printmaking to get my tables clean at the end of the day. I started by teaching my first graders a little bit about suminagashi, the Japanese paper marbling technique. Suminagashi translates to floating ink and it can create wonderful, vibrant marbled papers. While this was a great inspiration for our process, it wasn't a technique I believed the average first grade student could master. I also took inspiration from Helen Frankenthaler's "soak and stain" method of abstract expressionism. For this project, students started by making monotypes. I sprayed all the tables, and students painted in the puddles, then they pressed their papers to the paint. Essentially they were using the tables like giant stamps. The result was wonderful prints that seemed somewhat marbled, and somewhat like color field paintings. Each student made three prints this past week. One print was made up of mostly warm colors, one cool colors and one neutral colors. In my room, students sit at tables arranged in pods. We have 4 pods, so one was a warm color station, one cool, and one neutral. The remaining table group was used for clean stuff (writing names on papers, then self directed art time for early finishers). One of the great things about this project is kids have a lot of fun and feel like they are getting away with something as they paint on the table, but truthfully it is one of my easiest clean ups. Every time I do this project, my tables are cleaner at the end of the project than they were before we started.



The next step for this project is cutting, glueing and weaving. To be honest, weaving has always been one of my least favorite processes because so frequently the end result is numerous copies with little to no variation. By using monotypes instead of regular colored construction paper for my paper strips,  students get papers that are richer and more varied. By cutting their papers into strips, and collaging those papers before weaving, students again are able to add a little bit more personal style to their work. 



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Painted and Printed Pumpkins

This is a video I made to teach my elementary students how to make a painting of a pumpkin. What I love about this demo is painting a pumpkin helps to show kids how to blend colors and use value to make something look round but it also shows kids how repeating curved lines will create the illusion that they are wrapped around a curved form. This helps lay a little bit of a foundation to be used later when teaching linear perspective and for Op Art. For the background, I have students print using found objects as stamps. This can help to create a nice Pop Art type of feel particularly when kids add facial features. I encourage them to use cut shapes to create emoji type faces so they are practicing their cutting and gluing skills as well as making the composition a little more more expressive and unique. I did this with young students and it worked well to break up the activities. First, they painted just a circle focusing on creating a gradient. Next, they set that aside and printed...
Post a Comment
Read more

Who ARTed - New Podcast Coming!

Since the new(ish) National Core Arts Standards were adopted,  I have been giving a lot of thought to how I can get kids engaged in connecting and responding to art. While I love art history, it can be difficult to carry on a sustained conversation with the class. A number of students find history interesting, but a much more significant number of my students will join in a class discussion by asking "can we make art now?" Since I switched to format of my class to what I refer to as a "Gamified TAB" classroom, students have been happy and engaged in creating all sorts of different projects. Students pick their projects and earn their marker badge, clay badge, printmaking badge etc. The problem is in my initial rollout, almost everything was centered on the creation aspect of art. Now I am creating new badges for investigation, presentation etc. I created a comfy corner in my classroom where students can read and relax because exploring art history is a perfectly...
Post a Comment
Read more