Mono Print

Metallic Glue Relief

Tissue Paper Painting

Crayon Etching

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Collage and Chalk


The word "collage" mean to paste; it's a work of art made by pasting or gluing objects onto a background. It's a good idea to do the pasting on a heavy piece of cardboard, so your art work won't buckle and bend when it dries. The fun part is that you can glue on so many surprisingly different things.

It's fun to experiment with combinations of materials in your art. Try making a drawing of something real or just a design, using colored chalk on dark paper. Press hard as you draw with your chalk, and your lines will really stand out against the dark colored background.

Next you can tear or cut pieces of paper to glue into the spaces between your lines, to "color in" the spaces, trying not to cover up the bold chalk lines you made. Here are some things you can use to glue in the spaces: torn or cut colored or patterned papers, yarn or string, colored tape, cardboard, buttons, old calendar pages, newspaper, wrapping paper, ribbons, magazine pictures, pieces of hand-written letters or envelopes, old movie tickets... Can you think of any other things to glue on?

Try overlapping your glued-on pieces, linking one shape to another, and allowing some colors to peek out. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and Kurt Schwitters were artists who made beautiful collages.

It's a good idea to keep a box of collage materials handy at home, and you can keep adding recycled papers and objects to it, as they become available. Artists have always been great "recyclers."

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Recycled Tube Sculpture: Say hi to Perry!

This tube man's name is Perry. I love using recycled objects to make art with kids. Recently, we used various cardboard tubes from paper towel bathroom tissue rolls and oatmeal boxes to make tube sculptures.

We cut slits at about 3/4" intervals around the tops and bottoms of the tubes to fit them onto each other. We constructed the sculpture by gluing and taping the tubes together, applied gesso to the whole sculpture and painted it after it was dry. Adding on decorative papers, buttons and googly eyes made them really special. We glued and taped the sculptures to cardboard bases for sturdy support and stability.

Are you thinking about other things you could recycle to make art? Old CD's, plastic container lids, old jewel cases for CD's, old credit cards, paper grocery bags?