Presentation: The Big Three- Encouraging Elementary Students to - - PDF document

Presentation: The Big Three- Encouraging Elementary Students to Analyze Works of Art With John Post Hi, everyone. I'm John Post. Welcome to the summer conference. I've been doing this teaching job since 1991. It's a lot of years and sometimes I feel like I'm doing the same lessons over and over again even though I know that they're new to the kids. A lot of times I just feel like I got to do something new to challenge myself, that I just have to invent something completely new that I've never done before and go in a direction that I'm not sure if it's going to work out. Those are the times that I'm the most excited about a lesson. The things that I do that are already really successful I lose interest in. Even though it's new to a kid, I've seen it and how many times can I do it

• ver and over.

This year I came up with something new that I did with the kids that I'm pretty excited about. We made a big mural and this mural is 4 feet by 4 feet, and it's a painting mural. It's really bright, really colorful. It's a non-objective artwork. Now, it's in one of the hallways at our school, and everyone who sees it loves it. Let me tell you a little bit how this thing came to be. At the beginning of the year I decided that I wanted to talk about realistic art, abstract art, and non-objective art with the kids. The reason why I wanted to do that is that I wanted them to be able to look at a work of art when they visited the museum and to be able to say something intelligent about that artwork. If you know that you like abstract art, you can start there. You can go, "Ahh, what I like about this abstract piece is the way that the artist changed the shapes in this space," or if you know that you like realistic art, you'll be able to talk about how the artist made that art look realistic, or if you like non-objective art, you may be able to talk about that. I figure I would at least give the kids a place to talk intelligently about things when they went to the art museum, which is a field trip that the fifth graders took this

• year. I gave them some definitions for realistic art and abstract art and non-objective

art, and you can find those in my [After Pass 00:02:07] documents along with a slide show that I put together for them. One of the things that I noticed was that the definitions that I gave them were a little too long for them, so I came up with some short cheat sheet definitions as I call them, just a way for them to look at it and think about it real quickly.

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For realistic art, the cheat sheet definition that I gave them was that in a realistic artwork you, the viewer, can recognize everything. If it's a cityscape you can see all the things that are in the city and you can recognize all of the objects that are in this cityscape. None of it has been changed deliberately by the artist for artistic

• reasons. Everything is recognizable, so in a realistic artwork, everything should be

recognizable to the viewer. In an abstract artwork, what I told them was that artist changes things using his or her imagination, so some of the things in an abstract artwork have been changed on purpose. I showed the kids a portrait of a face, and this face has very different colors in it from skin tones, and I talked about how the artist deliberately change those. Then, lastly, I talked to the kids about non-objective artwork, and I told them that in non-objective artwork they would be able to recognize and know objects. There's nothing from the real world that's in there. It's all things that are from the art world, line, shape, color, texture, patterns, and so what we made as our mural this year were large non-objective paintings. The reason why we did this is because last year I did non-objective paintings with my students, and I hung them across the dry erase board and they looked fantastic. It looked like one giant painting, but I didn't have an idea in my head about where I was going to take these things in order to turn them into a mural, and so in my subconscious over the past year I started thinking about this. I happened to run across this stuff called bar top epoxy. What it is, is that bar top epoxy is a coating that gets poured over the top of things and it leaves a, it almost feels like a Plexiglas finish on top. It's shiny. It's durable. Its intended use is to go over the tops of woods in bars and to create a super slick shiny surface. Some people use this stuff on floors. They glue pennies down and then they pour a coat of this bar top epoxy over the top, but that wasn't what I did. What I did is I had the kids all make non-objective paintings. I talked about the elements and principles that go into a non-objective painting. I talked about how they could make their painting have movement and action by incorporating diagonal lines, by making lines that are, or shapes that are tilted off of their base, so that they look like they're floating and that they're moving. We discussed how they could make their paintings seem to have some movement and energy to them. Then, I had everybody, everybody in grades 3 through 6 make a non-objective painting. The ones that turned

• ut well I was sticking these up with magnets to my dry erase boards, and I knew I

was going to edit them down into a final mural. What I did was I got it down to about 20 or so paintings, and I brought them

• home. Then, I want up to Home Depot and I started to look around for some kind of

plywood that I could mount this stuff on. What I came across was something called

• underlayment. It's a very thin sheet of plywood about 1/8 of an inch thick, and Home

Depot has them pre-cut in 4 foot by 4 foot sections, so I bought some of that. Then, I bought some poplar strips, maybe 1 by 2 or 1 by 3, and I used those along the outside edge on the back of the underlayment. What I did with that was I glued that down with Elmer's to stiffen up the underlayment so it wasn't wobbly. Then, I took those same pieces of wood, the poplar, and I cut them and I nailed them onto the sides so that they would form a frame around the underlayment, and I

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painted that frame black. What I ended up with was a 4 foot by 4 foot framed piece

• f black plywood that had some durability to it because of the stuff that I glued down

the back, but it was also strong enough to support itself. Then, I took the paintings that the kids made, and since I ended up by 4 foot by 4 foot sheet of underlayment, I chose the 16 best paintings that were on 12 by 18 paper and I cropped them. I cut them down into 12 inch by 12 inch squares. After I had those, I arranged them into what I thought was a pleasing composition trying to set up some flow myself as I arranged the kid paintings. After that, I took some Elmer's Glue. This is not the kid's stuff, not the water kind, but the kind you buy at the hardware store. I poured some of that into a yogurt container and I added water until it was a nice brushable consistency, and then what I did with that is I took a foam 3-inch brush and I applied the Elmer's glue to the backs of the kid paintings. Then, I used a wallpaper smoother to flatten those out, and I glued 16 paintings to that plywood underlayment. I let that Elmer's Glue dry overnight. The wallpaper smoother is essential in this because it's what helps you to flatten out their bumpy construction paper non-objective paintings. Then, what I did after I had all the paintings glued down was I needed to use the bar top epoxy. The directions tell you to take equal parts of the hardener and the epoxy and mix them together. I mixed up about 8 ounces of each of those ingredients in a yogurt container, and then I took another foam brush, and what I did was I put on something called a skim coat. This skim coat goes right over the top of the paintings, and it's job is to just cover the paintings and coat them so that when you pour your clear coat on top it has something to stick to. I let that dry for about 7 hours in my art studio, and then it came time to mix up the cover coat of the epoxy. Now, the epoxy ends up being about 1/8 of an inch thick when it's dry, so I mixed a half gallon of the hardener and a half gallon of the epoxy together in a bucket that I purchased from Home Depot. One of the things that it says is that the epoxy is going to take 3 days to cure, but they give you a tip in the directions. The tip is to take the epoxy part of the mix and run it under warm or hot water for 15 minutes, so I did that in my kitchen sink. I just took the big bucket that I was going to pour the epoxy from. I set the gallon container of the epoxy in it, and I let that get run

• ver by hot water for 15 minutes and then I did the mixing.

After that, I poured the entire epoxy material over the top of the mural, and in this part right here I just lucked out. What happened is my frames happen to stick up about 1/4 of an inch above the size of the mural. What that allowed me to do was that allowed me to tip the epoxy from side to side so that I could get that even coverage

• f the entire thing. I just tipped the sides of the mural back and forth, and what that

did is that allowed the epoxy to run over the surface and give it a nice even coat. Then, I just let it dry overnight, and even though it's supposed to take 3 days to cure, my epoxy got dry to the touch within 12 hours. One of the tips that they recommend is that you must keep the epoxy in a room that is 75 degrees or above. Since my studio is in a separate building from my home, I just cranked up the thermostat to 77 and kept the building warm overnight and the epoxy really set up nicely. It dried really clear.

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The only thing that I would change in hindsight is that I got a few bubbles in my epoxy, and I think that's from where I was lifting the sides to move the epoxy from side to side on the mural. I would've come back out here about 10 or 15 minutes after I covered it and taken a stiff brush and pop some of those little bubbles, but other than that, the mural turned out great. It's a really great durable coating and it looks wonderful in the hallway. The kids love it. They're really proud of it. This was a project that I did to re-energize myself, and it looks so great my principal wants me to make more of them. The total cost for this project is about 200 bucks. The epoxy itself ran about 125, so that's the majority of the cost, but you can probably squeak out 2 murals out

• f that 2 gallons of epoxy that I ordered.

All the links are in the handout that are in my After Pass documents, and there's a slide show of the realistic abstract and non-objective art work that I showed the kids as well as some other things that you'll find useful in there, so check those

• ut. Thanks for watching.

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