Our Collages are Out of This World!!

.

My DragonWing Art students have been experimenting with various paint techniques, with the results being made into planets for colorful "out of this world" collages. 

We began by painting large (18x24") pieces of paper with black ink, leaving unpainted borders about the thickness of a ruler. We also used some glittery purple paint on the ink, to add some sparkle.  When dry, white paint was spattered on with a toothbrush, to make more stars in space.

On small sheets of white paper, we used liquid watercolors in several ways to achieve interesting surface texture.

We used the watercolors with salt, 

With saran wrap,

And with bubble wrap.

 plus liquid watercolor and shaving cream for marbling.

We also used bleeding tissue paper applied with water, removing the tissue paper when dry, to create colorful blends.

 And finally, we printed some papers with slices of pool noodles and tempera paint.

 Often, our hands ended up getting printed, too!

 All the papers that were created were used to make into planets and more for our collages. 

We used various bottles, caps, bowls, cd's, rolls of tape, and more as circle tracers for planets.

We used black crayons to add shadows to our planets to make them look round.  This was easy for some of the students, and more challenging for others.

 I showed the students how to cut rings for planets if they desired. 

 And the students began merrily cutting planets for their collages, to glue onto their painted and spattered background papers.

I gave the students strips of holographic contact paper, that they used to create fancy borders for their papers.

I also had strips of glow-in-the-dark contact paper, which was used on the sides of the collage pictured below.

 Finally, I also offered the students some glitter glue.  The bottles hadn't been used in a while, and the glue often squirted out in wonky and unexpected ways, but still, the sparkle really jazzes up the skies!

There are currently 5 students in my DragonWing Arts class; I unfortunately neglected to photograph one of the final collages.  I'll photograph it in a few days, and then add the pic to this post.  In the meantime, here's one last pic.  

Creating crazy colorful papers for collage

Here's the beginnings of new project with some fun preparatory steps!  Last week, my DragonWing Arts students painted large sheets of paper with black ink, and then painted over it as desired with a glittery paint.  These are going to become the backgrounds for colorful outer space collages.  We will also be splattering them with some white and silver paint, to create galaxies of stars. 

 So this week's task was to create some colorfully textured papers that can be cut into planets, or any other celestial object desired!  We did these several ways, using liquid watercolors and watercolor paper.  The technique used for the papers pictured in the photo at the top of this post was bubble-wrap printing.  The students wet their papers with a big brush, and then painted them with saturated colors.  Then, a piece of bubble wrap was placed on the wet paint, and some cardboard was placed on top to keep it in place as it dried.  Above are the results when dry. Yes, somehow I have purple bubble wrap!  The color has absolutely no function.  It's just pretty!

A similar process was used for the papers below, but instead of bubble wrap, students used crunched up pieces of wax paper and plastic wrap.  I love the color choices they made - there's paper created for an ice planet, and another for a fiery planet, and so on.

Students then saturated another piece of paper with wet watercolors and sprinkled them with salt. We used a mix of table salt and kosher salt.  The results, pictured below, are really lovely. 

 This one looks like it could be the earth!

Here's a couple more gorgeous closeups!

Finally, the students tried out shaving cream printing.  If you've never done this before, it is easy and messy, but its the kind of mess that cleans up easily.  Each student spread out some shaving cream on a tray.  They dripped liquid watercolors into the shaving cream, and swirled the colors with a fork or a pointy wooden stick. 

Then a piece of paper was pressed into the shaving cream, and the paper was squeegeed off afterward to remove excess shaving cream.  We used pop sticks today, but a rectangle of cardboard is also a great squeegee for this method.

 It's going to be fun to use all these papers to make our planets. If we have time, we will try some other techniques for even more planet paper!  Stay tuned...  we are working on a couple of other projects as well, so you won't be seeing the results for a few more weeks.

Shaving cream marbling, yet again!

Yup.  We've been marbling with shaving cream again, so even though I've posted this process before, I thought I'd share it one more time.  As you can tell by my student's face above, it is rather fun.... 

My DragonWing Arts kiddos began by taping rectangles DIRECTLY ON THE TABLE, slightly larger than their papers. 

 Then, I let them squirt shaving cream into the rectangles.
They used way too much, but since I only paid $1 per can, I didn't care.

 The kids used cardboard rectangles to spread out the shaving cream to fill the taped rectangles.  It was kind of like frosting a cake.

We reviewed the color wheel and discussed what happens when complementary colors get mixed together.  Depending on the proportions, complementary colors mix together to make colors like baby poo brown, dead mouse gray, swamp water greenish brown, and all sorts of ugliness.  We didn't want to achieve those sort of colors in our marbling, so when the students squeezed liquid watercolors onto their shaving cream, they tried to keep the complementary colors away from each other.  But sometimes they ignored the rules, as in the purple and yellow next to each other below.

 We used plastic knives and forks to swirl the colors together.  I demonstrated how to swirl gently to keep the colors from getting muddy, but the kids really loved mixing them all together so they generally swirled them like crazy! 

Then, the kids put their papers face down on their swirled colorful wonderfulness, and pressed them into the shaving cream.

 Finally, cardboard rectangles were used again, this time to squeegee the shaving cream off of their papers to reveal the marbled patterns.  The kids then smoothed out the shaving cream into their rectangles on the table again, and repeated the process to create second pieces of marbled papers. 

Finally, we squeegeed the excess shaving cream off the table.  Some of it went into a bucket of water to dump in the sink, but since we don't have a sink in the room where the classes are held, some of the colorful shaving cream went into the garbage with the cardboard squeegees.  I'm betting the custodian was pretty confused by the colorful foam in the trashcan!  By the way, the kids' hands were quite colorful by the time we were done, but liquid watercolors are washable, unlike food coloring.  So while food coloring might work well, I don't advise using it! 

Below are the results of our marbling.  As you can see, some of them are a little muddier than others!  You'll have to wait a couple of weeks to see what we will be using the marbled papers for!!

 A few close-ups:

 I think this one below might be my example. 

 You can find other blog posts (from this blog) about marbling with shaving cream here, here, and here.  And some other fun with shaving cream, here. 

Marbling with shaving cream

I know you've probably seen this before, but it is always such a cool thing to do!  I previously blogged about using this process; you can find the post by clicking HERE. 

Today my DragonWing Arts after-school students leaned how easy and fun it is to make marbled paper using shaving cream and liquid watercolor paints.

I taped off an area of our work table the size of our paper, 12x18".  I squirted some shaving cream into the rectangle and the kids smoothed it out with a cardboard rectangle.  Then, they dripped liquid watercolors into the shaving cream. 

Using a fork, the paint was swirled through the shaving cream.  

A piece of paper was placed carefully on top, and pressed gently.  The paper was then removed (along with globs of gooey shaving cream), and cardboard rectangles were used to squeegee the excess shaving cream off of the paper.  That's all there is to it!  And here is what the result was from the piece being worked on above.

We added a little fresh shaving cream each time, smoothed it out again, and started the marbling process again.  Here's a couple more examples.

It will be a couple of weeks before I can show you what we are doing with them (but I think it will be cool), so you'll just have to wait and see!