Giant papier-mache masks and much more, complete!

My three DragonWing Art Students just completed their 8-week session "Masks and Crazy Faces".  Here they are, modeling the masks that they made.  If you'd like to know how we  made these masks, they were made with paper bag armatures.  You will find the specifics about building the armatures and adding the papier-mache, in a previous blog post, HERE.  And then, you can read how we hollowed out the armature and prpared them for painting, in another blog post, HERE.

We painted the masks with school acrylics.  I like the permanence of the paint surface.  Finally, the kids were given a choice of crafty materials to use for embellishment, including wiggle eyes, yarn, colored craft foam, painted fiberfill, jewels, pipe cleaners, and pompoms.  Because I only had three students for this session, much of the embellishing was done with low temperature hot glue.  Since the kids are 3rd and 4th graders, I asked them to direct me where/what to glue, and I was the only one to use the glue gun.  If I had more students, they would have used tacky glue more often.

A hole was punched on the top of each mask, and wire was added so that they can easily be hung over a nail on the wall.

My students also made giant crazy faces out of cardboard, with the facial features (eyes, nose, mouth) made out of scraps of lightweight tooling foil, that was gently tooled and colored with Sharpies.

 Here they are below, still in progress.  They were painted with school acrylics, and then the features were glued on.  Embellishment was added with oil pastels, feathers, pipe cleaners, jewels, etc.

 All done!  In case you can't tell, this young lady above made her crazy face REALLY BIG!!

 
My students also made these fun little monster heads when we were through making messes with papier-mache and paint!  They are very easy to create.

For each monster, two squares of paper were required.  The squares were each folded diagonally in both directions, and then one diagonal was cut from a corner to the center.  Then, the triangles on either side of the cut were overlapped and glued. The two resulting open pyramids were then glued together with a hinge of paper on the back, and tongues, teeth, eyes, ears, etc were added.  Students could use the same cut and fold process for eyes and/or ears if desired.  I think they are kind of fun!  

 And in case those three projects weren't enough, we also did a quickie project painting dragon eyeballs based on a project discovered on Instagram.

 And we painted wacky faces on roofing felt with the leftover acrylics.  They were cut out and glued onto a paper that had been "painted" by placing bleeding tissue paper on the wet paper, and then removing the tissue after the color bled out.  Here's a couple of them.

 DragonWing Arts is now on break until January, when we will be focusing on pop and op art projects to bring cheerful color into the gloom of winter!