Toothpaste Batik - this year's batch

I've blogged about this insane process before, here and here and here. As a matter of fact, the first link is my most popular blog post of all time, by a landslide, and also one of my first posts on this blog! Go figure...

This year I gave the kids the challenge of coming up with an image based (loosely) on the theme "Fantasy". The results included dragons (yeah!), castles, mermaids, unicorns, wizards, a phoenix, and more. If the kids hadn't just finished those Laurel Burch papier-mache cats, I think I would have used her work as our motivating theme. Oh well. Last year the batiks were based on Matisse, and the previous year's inspiration was architectural images.

As always with this project, it is a delight walking into my classroom each morning, as it smells delightful - and minty fresh, as our batik resist is a mixture of toothpaste and Aloe Vera lotion. Not everyone is done, but here's a sampling of the work:

More tooling foil dragons

Another handful of kids are done - so here's their results.

It's very hard to photograph these - the images are much easier to understand when you are looking at the 'real thing'!

More to come soon...

A taste of things to come - more dragons

Every year my 6th graders do a tooling foil relief project. I switch up the theme to keep myself from getting bored. Last year was African masks, with a group of uber-talented kids. Other favorite themes have been Medieval shields, and Egyptian faces.

This year the challenge was dragons, and the first kids are now done. I think this was a real challenge for these kids. The details were tough for them to do. In the end I offer color choices of permanent markers or acrylic paints mixed with ModPodge to a glossy transparency, and suggest only minimal color - for example JUST the eye of the dragon. But they have resisted and are going overboard with color :(

The girl whose work is at the top of the post used paint, and wanted to also paint the moon PINK until I talked her out of it.

The boy who made the dragon on the left below had a really striking piece until he started scribbling colors everywhere. We tried to get it off (unsuccessfully) so he blocked in some areas with color instead. It's definitely not as successful as it was just black and silver with a red eye.

The girl who made the dragon on the right (if you can find it in the image) really overdid EVERYTHING, but, in the end, said to me "I absolutely LOVE the way my project turned out!" And what can be better than hearing that from a 6th grade girl who has attitude-plus?

By the way, they selected a piece of mat board in either black or an assortment of colored scraps I have, and then used metallic markers - to sign their names - and then of course went overboard decorating the mats as well. (Hearts? On a dragon?) Oh well - they are enamored with the metallic markers I have and there's just so many times I can say "KEEP IT SIMPLE".

Now that I've posted this I feel like I'm officially on vacation! Passover starts at sunset tonight. Have a happy holiday everyone!

My Dragon Obsession - version #1

So I have this 'thing' for dragons, and I'm forcing it on all my students!


I want every grade level to do a dragon project of some sort before I retire in June. We'll display them all together somehow in our K-12 art show in May.

Third graders are the first dragon-makers. They were beyond excited about this project, and the craziest most problematic kids forgot to misbehave they were so into their dragons.

I didn't want the kids to copy my, or any other version of a dragon. Since they are mythological, the stuff of legends, I wanted kids to feel free to make their own decisions about what dragons should look like. We brainstormed for ideas about what a dragon should look like, and put a huge list on the white board. It included stuff like claws, spikes, horns, sharp teeth, breathing fire, long neck, wings, scales, tendrils, mean eyes, a tail, and much more. We agreed that their dragon should probably have SOME of these things for it to be identifiable as a dragon, but it didn't need them all. We talked about Chinese dragons being serpentlike without wings, vs a dragon with big wings and a dinosaur or other reptilian body.


The kids began by sketching their ideas on newsprint. Then each student was given a piece of peel-and-stick clear vinyl (I got a boatload of it donated. YEAH!) The dragons were drawn with a black Sharpie and colored with colored Sharpies. We discovered that in an emergency, you could 'erase' by coloring over a mistake with a light-colored Sharpie and QUICKLY wiping it off with a tissue. One marker essentially erases the other, and this was a great problem-solving discovery.

Then each student was given a piece of aluminum foil. The foil was crumpled and then flattened, and the vinyl was peeled and stuck on the foil. Then the foil was cut out around the dragon, leaving a silver-colored edge showing. This idea was adapted from an awesome fish project that Pat posted here on her blog Sharpie Woman. (Thanks, Pat!)

The dragons were then glued onto pieces of black tag that I cut to size. Cutting them individually was the biggest pain of this project, but there was no way these dragons were going to be the same size.

For the final step, each student picked a piece of colored construction paper to frame their work, and decorated the frame with a black Sharpie.

The kids are beyond proud of these, so I hope you enjoy them!

Lovin' my summer bugs

Dragonflies and damselflies everywhere! I adore them - they don't bite, they just flit around looking pretty and dragon-like, and sometimes stopping fleetingly to get a frustrated photographer (me) rushing for the camera. They are very tough to photo since they don't stay put. And then blogger goes and rotates some of them sideways... Anyhow, since I can't have a real live dragon, a dragonfly is a reasonable 2nd best. (The damselfly is kind of like a dragonfly but the wings go back instead of out to the sides.) You've really got to click on these photos and enlarge them to see amazing details!


I also am in awe of the amazingly gorgeous leafy sea dragon, though I've only seen them in photos and it's not likely I'll ever see one for real. So the abundant dragonflies flitting about by the lake will satisfy me. Here's a sea dragon:

And here's a bug on a water lily:

And a creepy (but cute) spider!
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Oops, not a bug (below), just my silly cat. Does she think she's hiding? Yes, that is a rope you can see in the photo. She's not tangled. She is basically a house cat but goes outside merrily with a harness and rope tied to the porch. "Dope on a rope"!