Monday, June 20, 2011

Last lesson for first Summer Art Session! Mixed Media Cityscape: Masking, Splattering and Oil Pastel!

Ack! I'm behind on getting the lesson updates and masterpieces posted!

The last lesson for the first session was last Wednesday. It had its interesting moments.

This lesson uses some "spattering" methods, so we talked a little about Jackson Pollock (for more info on him, go here).

Then we would move on to some oil pastel (same medium we used on our funky cats). Therefore, this was a mixed media project to end the session! First, the artist starts with two pieces of paper. One piece is a colored sheet of the artist's choice of a background color - the other is white.



On the white paper, sketch a light "cityscape". It can be modern, whimsical, geographically specific - it's up to the artist!



Then the white cityscape is cut out.



The cut out cityscape is placed on the colored paper. It's not glued or taped down. Rocks or other heavy but small objects can be placed on it to keep it down.

On a newspaper or other covered service outside, the artist begins to splatter the sky area with paint (in this case, we used washable school paint) with an old toothbrush. It's important to get splatters densely around the top of the cityscape as well.





When the splattering is complete and DRY (very important!), the artist removes the white cityscape sheet.

Oil pastel is then used to add the highlights and cityscape details.




Two of the major issues that we ran into with this project on Wed was one, some of the students struggled with being able to splatter effectively. Unlike Jackson Pollock, we weren't going to throw the paint across the room onto a huge canvas (unless they wanted Ms. Jill to have a heart attack). It took some trial and error to use the toothbrush and get the hang of the splattering. The second major issue was when the wet spatter was sitting on the hot porch to quickly dry, the sprinklers came on. It turned into a helpful accident on some (the water helped reveal the unmasked area), and not so much on the others.

However, in the end, we did have a fun variety of colors and cityscapes! I think the kids enjoyed it!















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