monoprinting & teaching the creative collective

For my last printmaking lesson with my 6th graders, I really wanted to try something a little different. In most of our projects these past 6 weeks, their imagery has been basic shapes (footballs, peace signs, flowers etc), their names or just their initials. I'm not looking for deep intellectual pieces but when they immediately resort to something familiar or simple it takes the aspect of play out of creating. Their willingness to play and experiment with a new medium and just see what happens is absent. Which is incredibly sad to see in a group so young! 

So I made them do monoprinting! Quick, abstract, instant results and pretty unexpected and uncontrollable results! Also to keep with Melyssa's Creative Collective and the current prompt, "Anything-Goes Art," it gave me an excuse to just play around with a medium I haven't worked with since college! Albeit, I just made some basic sample prints to illustrate how to do this project but it was definitely a nice break from my usual routine of watercoloring/writing/cleaning/binding repeat. 

And even better, I had everything I needed at home to make these quick little prints! 

Supplies:

• Saran or plastic wrap
• Masking tape
• Paints (we used acrylic but any paint will work)
• Paint brushes
• Assorted pieces of paper
• Optional: paper plates

1. Tear off a piece of Saran wrap and tape it to your table. If you have messy kiddos, use a craft table or put a table cloth underneath the plastic. A piece of tape in each corner should be good to keep it in place. 

2. Squeeze out a little bit of paint either in the corner of your Saran wrap or on a paper plate.

3. Paint across the Saran wrap, roughly the size of the paper you'll be printing onto. The thicker it is on the Saran wrap, the more paint that will transfer to the paper when you print. If you want to do writing, just keep in mind you will have to paint it backwards in order for it to be facing the right direction once it's printed. 

4. Quickly place your paper on top of the paint and push down evenly all over the paper. If you wait too long, the paint will dry and won't transfer to the paper. 

5. Carefully peel up the paper from one corner and see what you made! 

6. Wait for the paint patch on the Saran wrap to dry (it doesn't take very long!) or move onto a clean patch to spread more paint for another layer! You can also wait for your paper to dry or print immediately. If you print immediately, the colors will blend. Whereas if you wait, they'll be more like layers on top of each other. 

7. Keep repeating steps 3-6 until you're happy with your print! Then make another! Or three...

I LOVED watching the kiddos let loose and just play and make a mess. They were probably more productive today than all our other days combined! We did make quite a mess but the best part is that all you have to do is peel up the Saran wrap and toss it for clean up! Perfect! 

Have you ever tried monoprinting? Or have you done printmaking with kiddos before?

Valentine Collage Heart Banner

I'm not the biggest fan of this upcoming holiday but one aspect I do like is all of the handmade gifts. Similar to Christmas, it seems like everyone goes all crafty gung-ho for their V-Day cards and gifts. Always more thoughtful to send something handmade than store bought! 

It's even cuter when it's something handmade by a kiddo. My first graders and I made some adorable collage heart banners this week for Valentine's Day. I did this project last year with my kiddos but changed it slightly...so it's Heart Banner 2.0! They're super easy to make and work as a Valentine gift or just decoration. 

Supplies:

• assorted small strips of paper (we used graph paper, red/pink construction, shiny silver and pink paper and tissue paper)
• a sheet of normal paper sized 8.5" x 11"
• a sheet of larger paper in a different color
• a sharpie or marker
• scissors
• a glue stick
• yarn or ribbon

1. Cover the ENTIRE front of the 8.5 x 11 paper with the little strips of paper. They can overlap each other too, just make sure they're glued down really well. 

2. Flip the paper over and draw hearts all over the back. They can be the same size or vary. We got about 8 hearts from one sheet of paper.

3. On the larger sheet of paper, draw hearts slightly larger than the first page of hearts. Make sure you draw the same amount as the other page so each heart has a pair. 

4. Cut out all of the hearts! With little ones, it's a good exercise for practicing cutting along a line. Took a little while to cut out all 16 hearts too! This is the exciting part because the kiddos don't know exactly what the hearts will look like when they're cut out! 

5. Make heart sandwiches! Space the larger hearts out with the string on top of them. Put lots of glue on the underside of the collaged hearts and glue on top of the large heart, sandwiching the string between the two hearts. Glue hearts all along the string until you run out of hearts. 

Optional: Have the kiddos decorate the hearts! We had bottles of glitter glue but stickers or markers would work too! Then hang up them up! 

It got a little hectic when we broke out the glitter glue for them to decorate but the kiddos really enjoyed it! Even the boys didn't mind playing with pink paper for an hour. 

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Edit: Hey friends! I also just got notified that I'm nominated for a Best of Blog Awards in the Best of Blogger Shops: Best Arts and Prints category over at My So-Called Chaos! If you feel so inclined, you can vote for me here (I'm in the last section of the voting categories).  Angie is such a sweetheart for putting these awards on, and it's so sweet of someone out there to nominate me! Definitely made my day! 

teaching the Creative Collective

A couple weeks ago, I was struggling to figure out a lesson for my 5th and 6th grade collage classes. They're old enough that I can do more ambitious and challenging projects and I love seeing what they make when given unique prompts and materials. Then during another restless night, I had the idea to borrow Melyssa's brilliant idea for the first prompt of the Creative Collective! A word for 2014!

Not familiar with the Creative Collective? Melyssa over at the Nectar Collective had the brilliant idea to share 23 creative prompts throughout the year to get people inspired to create, share, encourage and see other people's work! Pretty fantastic right? 

So back to the kiddos...I asked them: What word(s) do you want to focus on this year? What do you want to accomplish? How will you make your word happen? Their response was incredible! 

We spent two weeks on this project. Week one was brainstorming their word and creating the background. Week 2 was for finding a creative way to write their word. After their collage was complete, I had them write on the back of their piece a list of ways they were going to achieve their goal. Their words were so varied, it was really exciting to see them share their word and get into the project. I really loved seeing what imagery they used and associated with their words. 

Some memorable words: dog (he plans to save up to get a dog), focus, creative writing, be brave (she wants to stand up to bullying at her school), dare, horses (she competes in equestrian competitions and wants to medal this year), and relax (he said he gets wound up in school so much he doesn't relax at all). I'm definitely going to keep this project around and hopefully find more ways to teach Melyssa's Creative Collective prompts! 

What's your word for the year? My word for 2014: intrepido (Italian for fearless!)

DIY paper bag portfolios

For my art lessons, I was in a pinch as to how to store my 8th grader's artwork for this session. Luckily during one of my restless nights of sleep, I came up with this quick solution using paper bags! It was really easy and immediately solved our storage problem, for super cheap too! 

Supplies: 

• A large paper bag (the larger the bag, the larger the portfolio will be)
• Scissors
• Wide tape (if it's colorful, even better!)

1. Carefully cut out the bottom panel of the paper bag, right along the edge. 

2.  Pop out the side panels so they fold out to the side instead of towards the middle. Squish them flat right along the side panel's middle fold.

3. Run a strip of wide tape all across the bottom edge with half of it hanging over the edge. Carefully fold the remaining half of tape to the other side of the portfolio. Trim the edges if needed.

4. Reinforce the handles with more tape. Now decorate and fill it with all your special creations!

Want some more ideas for how to up-cycle and repurpose your paper bags?

• Paper bag folders
• Woven paper bag handle baskets
• Paper bag notebooks
• Paper bag mailing envelopes

watercolors from scratch

One of the workshops I have been teaching lately is watercolors from scratch! The kiddos and I whipped up a batch of watercolors on the first day and now they're exploring color mixing and painting in their own handmade sketchbooks. Making the watercolors with them was a lot of fun, it was pretty much a colorful science experiment. 

It was also surprisingly easy to make them too. And if any of the kiddos get curious about what yellow tastes like, it won't hurt them! The recipe we used was comprised of ingredients we had in my kitchen...so any accidental or purposeful ingestion won't be a problem. 

To make your own homemade watercolors, you'll need:

• 1/2 cup baking soda
• 1/4 cup white vinegar
• 1/4 cup cornstarch
• 1 teaspoon corn syrup
• assortment of food coloring

1. Gather all the ingredients and combine the baking soda, cornstarch and corn syrup in bowl. Have the vinegar and a fork ready. 2. When ready, pour the vinegar into the mixture and mix quickly with the fork. The mixture will bubble like crazy but keep mixing until it is all combined. 3. Once it is all mixed, pour the science goop into small containers (paint palette, dixie cups or an ice cube tray work great). 4. Add a couple drops of food coloring to each container. The more drops of color, the more intense the watercolor will be. 5. Let them dry! The kiddos had to wait a week to use theirs and they worked perfectly!

After the class, it was pretty apparent whether it was one of the boys or the girls who made a certain color...the boys mostly mixed varying shades of greens and blues, or vomit green as they called it, while the girlies had a broader color spectrum and a lot more reds and purples. Some kiddos stayed in a certain color range so I made some extra primary colors the day before the class to complete the color wheel! I'll share some more photos from the class as it progresses (and hopefully photos not taken on my phone during the frenzy of color mixing).

summer printmaking workshop

I wanted to share a bit of the projects I made with my kids during my summer printmaking workshop with Arts Outreach. Like the bookmaking workshop, I used a lot of projects from previous workshops or lessons. Luckily, I had a really good group of kids and a much smaller class compared to last summer, so I was able to be a little ambitious with our projects! Our schedule for the week was:

• Monday: styrofoam box embossed printing
• Tuesday: linoleum and cork carving, and puffy paint/CD prepping
• Wednesday: printing day for linoleum carvings and puffy paint drawings
• Thursday: veggie printing, potato carving & making screens for boot-leg screen-printing
• Friday: print their screens on fabric

It was a hectic and messy week but it was really fun! Because of the dangers of carving linoleum with little kiddos, I didn't manage to get any photos from the carving day. Fortunately there were no lost appendages, so you really didn't miss much! There were a lot of reoccurring designs this summer, lots of Ben 10's, mustaches and I even vetoed the use of "YOLO" on one day. 

Chelsea: 1, Pop culture: 0!

summer bookmaking workshop

Last week was an absolute blur. Between filing paperwork then running from the pool to the school, if you had asked me what day of the week it was I would probably have responded with "accordion book day." During summer workshops, my days of the week are distinguished by what the project is for the day. Our week's schedule was:

• Monday: mini paper bag books & baby oil and oil pastel on paper bags for our altered book covers
• Tuesday: Mini accordion watercolor books & start the altered book project
• Wednesday: Coptic binding basics
• Thursday: Black/white nature print book with rubber band/paper clip binding
• Friday: finished altered books

Every day we worked on their altered books a little more too. This group was really great and super eager to learn new things! What really surprised me was how much they enjoyed the altered book project. In some other classes that I introduced this project, it was like pulling teeth to get them to even write their name in the book. With this group, everyday they couldn't wait to break out their books, even going so far as printing out photos and bringing in their own supplies to add to their books. It was so much fun to walk around and see them playing and experimenting with their books!

I did a lot of these projects for last year's workshop, and others are from classes I taught during the school year. I didn't really get a chance to take any photos during the actual process of making them. I might do some in-depth posts about how to make some of the new projects but here are some photos from my week of bookmaking! Psst...this week is printmaking!!!

Monday: mixing baby oil and oil pastels on paper bag panels

Monday: mini paper bag notebooks

Tuesday: mini accordion watercolor books

Wednesday: Coptic binding basics

Thursday: nature printing and rubber band/paper clip binding

This day was the most messy!

Friday: altered books! This girl's altered book was really fun! She had pages of paper cut out scenes