While volunteering at Old Friends Club, I revived a previous lesson inspired by Wassily Kandinsky for a group art project with seniors. We were inspired by Kandinsky's 'Color Study: Squares with Concentric Circles'. I introduced the project by likening its pieces to Granny squares.
The project uses deli paper sheets that are taped atop a piece of white computer (or construction) paper that has a black outline of a 4"X4" square printed on it. You will have to trace a square if you use construction paper.
Students are instructed to draw/color abstract (imperfect) concentric circles to fill the entire (interior) square space with color. Even Kandinsky left white space occasionally! We used rather brightly colored Sharpies. You may also like using brush-style Sharpies.
I use liquid starch (STA-FLO brand) to decoupage the thin deli paper squares onto a stretched canvas. Oh, and the paper has a waxy side, so be sure to use the other side when you apply markers to your square. Even so, some markers will want to bleed through, which is another reason for a paper background layer.
Be sure to plan out your composition so that you have an even number of 4-inch squares. I recommend not purchasing your canvas until you know the proper dimensions. Sometimes there are absences and you may need to make an extra square or two. It's fun to ask the teacher of the classroom or another art volunteer to create their own piece to complete the group project.
For our next project, we did scratch painting on prepared scratch paper art pads. I remember making my own scratch paper by coloring a piece of paper (with crayons or oil pastels?) and covering it with black (tempera?) paint or India ink.
Using a pointed wooden stylus (round toothpicks may work in a pinch), students will scratch lines to reveal the colors underneath. You can create your own flowers or try your hand at making butterflies. Some scratch pads come pre-drawn with gray images for budding artists to trace and reveal the underpainting colors. This is similar to adult coloring books, though seemingly too challenging for some.
For inspiration, I like to use a website that shows the top 10 flower paintings from the 16th century thru modern day. Many of the most famous artists are in this group: Eduard Manet, Claude Monet, Georgia O'Keefe, Vincent Van Gogh, and Andy Warhol. You may also recognize Jan Brueghel the Elder, Albrecht Durer, Henri Fantin-Latour, Katsushika Hokusai, and Judith Leyster. The last two artists were new to me. Van Gogh was probably familiar with the work of Hokusai since he often used the works of Japanese artists as inspiration for his own artwork. See my June 2019 post "Japanese Art and Van Gogh".
For our flowers we didn't use the scratch paper and instead used washable markers. Then, we did butterflies on these beautiful scratch papers. They were inspired by Egyptian art from 1350 B.C., the Renaissance, a painting by Salvador Dali, and Damien Hirst's "Kaleidoscope" series of large paintings in which his patterned pieces are entirely composed of butterflies.
Continuing with the theme, for New Year's we constructed butterflies out of origami paper and pipe cleaners. The paper needs to be square and it is simple to convert almost any (thinner) rectangular sheet of paper into a square. Fold one corner diagonally toward the opposite side, then cut off the excess.
Each butterfly uses two squares of the same size paper. It's fun to use two different patterned papers.
The inspiration for the butterflies was New Year's fireworks radiating out from a center point. Before getting to this project, I highlighted the works of Fauvist artist, Henri Matisse. Matisse liked to use paper cutouts. I also showed pictures of his museum in Nice, France, from our trip in 2011 and his works on display in the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, from our Baltic cruise in June 2019.
Before Christmas, we made greeting cards using bubble-cut images printed off the Internet. We then embellished them with stickers and markers.
For the Lunar New Year or Chinese Year of the Rat, we decided to make rat cookies using a Mickey Mouse cookie cutter that was bent to make a pointier nose.
While we baked and iced store-bought cookie dough and iced the cookies using butter-cream icing, the seniors decorated them. Some seniors also helped cut out the rat shapes.
We constructed pie slice cookie boxes out of yellow tagboard and decorated the boxes to look like cheese wedges using (black, brown, orange, and red) washable markers. The holes were drawn in marker using organic round shapes of different sizes, often colored in. The end of each box had a cute rat label saying, "Happy Chinese New Year 2020".
This was a fun way of transporting the cookies and made a nice gift for the caretakers.
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