3D Art_Making Myths

Welcome back! I’m sure you guys have been wondering how our sculptures turned out, so here is an update for you all! The sculptures from the past four weeks turned out AMAZING… like mind blowingly amazing! The kids were able to portray the Ancient Egyptian gods and goddesses in their own personal way by painting the wooden base with different hieroglyphs as well as painting the animal heads with metallic colors. Take a look!

CHALLENGES

Now, throughout this project, there were a number of challenges.

First of all, the clay forms cracks once it dries. The process of mending the dry clay was a process, let me tell you. We first squeezed hot glue into the cracks, waited for it to dry, and then painted a thin coat of gel medium to hold the crack and the glue together. We then took thin strips of tissue paper to create a bandaid effect, laid it on the crack and then did a final coat of gel medium on top. This was a very effective way of mending the cracks on our sculptures.

The second challenge was painting the actual metallic paint on our animal heads. The metallic paint had to be mixed with the very fast drying gel medium because we needed a medium to extend the paint and actually adhere to the dried clay. The combination of gel medium and metallic paint dries fairly quickly and although it does extend the paint, when the combination dries before adhering to the clay, it would clump up like glue would. The kids had to work fairly quickly before the clumping happened.

The final challenge that I observed was painting with teeny tiny brushes to create the detail in the wooden bases. If you look at the upper right sculpture, you can see the tiny hieroglyphs painted onto the bottom. Those hieroglyphs took a super long time and a lot of patience for the student.

This super long four-week project took a lot of patience and effort from our students, but all that hard work paid off. The kids and parents were extremely impressed by the sculptures and we were able to part ways quite happily with our Ancient Egyptian gods and goddesses.