Hello again! AAAAaaaaaaand we're back with another update of this year's summer program!
So this week was a bit different from our past two classes. The first two weeks we focused on a single skill and developed it throughout the week in forms of projects. This week we exposed our students to a variety of materials and had our students experiment (yeah, that's where we got the title of this week) with these new materials. Let me show you what they did because I can't wait any longer!

CLAY

Air dry clay is hard to work with because it's so stiff, but you can see our students work little by little to mold and attach the different "body" parts to their creations. The students worked with different tools to engrave and cut the clay as well as use water to smooth out the surface and help the clay stick to each other. Look how detailed and intricate their sculptures are!

CLAY + PAINT = SCULPTURE

Now we had to make these clay creatures come to life with a little bit of paint so we had our students apply their knowledge from Summer Art_PAINTING to this week! Our students once again mixed their primary colors into secondary colors and tertiary colors to add personality to their sculptures. These tiny sculptures will come in handy later on in the week (which means..keep reading!)

DICE

The next project was creating their own dice with left over cardboard and paper. We painted scrap paper to make our own colored paper and wrapped it around cardboard to create a cube.

SCULPTURE + DICE = BOARD GAME

So if you haven't already guessed, all these mini projects were for our board game! Our students painted on a large piece of canvas to create their own board game. The tiny sculptures were their pieces for the game and they used their dice to roll! Check it out! The kids even made cards with "moves" written on them. It was so much fun watching the students play their own board game. After class, Ms. Nikol (our instructor) and I were talking about how grateful we were to have students come to art class during their summer vacation and experience different materials and art work. Going to a water park is fun, but being able to work with other students and share an interest is just simply amazing.

SCRATCH PAPER

The last day of class was probably my favorite. The students used waxy pastels to create a colorful pattern and then used black oil pastel to cover it all up. It's interesting to see how the black doesn't blend all the colors together, but instead just creates a second layer. The students then took toothpicks to scratch a design to reveal the colors underneath. Some of our students just drew a picture while others got super creative and drew an abstract work of art.