Large scale tiger murals

On of our final projects for the semester are large scale collaborative tiger murals made on 12 x 12 sheets with tempera paint. 

The way this worked this year was as follows:

1. Teacher selects image and uses online program to enlarge and print.

2. Each design is divided into at least  30 squares for a class of  25.

3. The back of each design is numbered, an arrow drawn to indicate what is "up" and a symbol to remember which mural it belongs to.

4. The image is cut apart and students are assigned pieces.

5. Each student uses grid drawing to make sure their piece is drawn correctly.

6. All the student work is assembled before painting to find drawing mistakes.  Students then collaborate with each other to fix drawing issues before painting.

7. After a couple of class periods, the individual pieces are arranged again and students figure out where they have painting issues to fix.

8. Students who finish their project early can help other students finish their painting.

 9.   When all the projects are finished, they are taped together on the back and put on display in the halls.

Above is me and my 2nd hour class installing their mural in the Central office for the District!

Here are images of students in progress, the original images, and one example of the organized back grid with student names.

Carthage district show

So glad to see parents, grandparents, and students enjoying hundreds of works by students of all ages from around the Carthage School District.  Here are some of my students and their works.

Making Sketchbook covers

I start my sketchbooks with some kind of cool paper treatment.  Sometimes its an op art piece.  Sometimes its marble paper.  Sometimes its bubble paper.  Either way, the student generates some kind of cool design.  Alternatively, the easy way is to pick a class color from butcher paper and use that, decorating afterward.  this needs to be larger than the cover structure by at least several inches each way.  Next, I pre-cut the covers to size.  I start with 28 x 44 8 ply poster board, so for 8 1/2 x 11 paper, it makes the most sense for me to cut them to 11 x 9 to eliminate waste.  Each student gets 2 blanks and we laminate the materials together with thinned down elmers glue.

For an individual cover students need the decorative outside paper, a board, and an end sheet.  the end sheet could be a plain or colored sheet of office paper, or sometimes I use the class sylabus so it is integrated into the structure of the book.

with the table covered, the decorative sheet is laid down, and a 1-2 inch house brush is used to completely cover the sheet with a thin, wet layer of glue.  the tops and bottoms are folded up, and then the corners are folded into corners (I call this the present fold, because you use a similar technique to wrap a Christmas present).  Once the decorative paper is completely wrapped around the board, the end sheet also has a layer of glue, then that is adhered to the inside of the cover, to protect and seal the decorative paper from future damage.

This is set to dry for the next stage, which is book binding.  this will be covered in the next post here.

Superhero grid drawing

Since so many Hollywood movies have superhero content, I figured we could use them to learn a new drawing technique, grid drawing...