Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Mini Louise

Materials:
- Craft Sticks
- Black and White Paint (Acrylic works best)
- Assortment of "knick knacks"
- Glue
Louise Nevelson is always a great artist to reference when introducing assemblage vs. collage. The students made these mini assemblages in two class periods. The first class period we assembled our bases by laying two craft sticks parallel to one another. Craft sticks were glued on top going in the other direction. Make sure they write their name on their projects!


Next, we piled on the goodies.. my kids actually loved doing this more than I expected!

















The second day was our paint day. I emphasized to get in all the cracks and crevices. I told them a good rule of thumb would be that I shouldn't be able to tell what each item's original color was.




7 comments:

  1. Hmm I just lost my comment. Let's start again! I do a Nevelson project too. I posted about it at: http://plbrown.blogspot.com/search/label/Louise%20Nevelson
    I wondered what kind of glue you are using on yours, and what kind of acrylic (your white seems to cover better than mine). Also how do you hang them?
    Great project!!

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  2. Oh my gosh, I love yours!! I love the color and I love the shoe box lid idea! Makes it great for presentation purposes!

    I used regular elmer's glue and my white was tempera! I didn't think it worked well actually because it can easily chip off and you need A LOT of coats. (You can see... I can still the color of most of the items in the picture above.)

    To hang them, I simply glued them to a construction paper base, labeled with name, and used a good ol' stapler to the bulletin board.

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  3. Thanks. Both of our variations are good! My project would have been too much for the younger kids but yours was perfect for them. My project takes more time and planning.

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  4. I like this idea of doing them small. I've done the shoebox lid one, with great results, but almost went crazy from the mess of 150 assemblages being stored and worked on for three weeks or more!

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  5. THese are so awesome! I love Louise Nevelson and what a great project for little ones!

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  6. I did this project with all my 1st & 2nd graders (over 200 kids). We had a great time collecting objects and reusing objects we would otherwise throw away. The 3D quality was fabulous~ working with really tactile materials and learning how to use a lot more glue then normal. We used acrylic paints and I found old phone book pages were perfect to move wet sculptures around the room. We dried all sculptures on large styrofoam trays. The last day of the 4 day project we had a critique and created a large sculpture. Each student drew a popsicle stick with a number on it. When their number was called, they could place their sculpture anywhere on a gridded template. All could move someelse's sculpture once and a few special numbers could make two moves if they felt it improved the entire piece. We had an intelligent conversation about what the pieces had in common, how they differed, etc. Great lesson~ thank you!!! Photos are on my blog (under Week 9, Go Green Week).

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