We each made a video on an art technique so I chose acrylic painting techniques aimed at high school or middle school kids. I covered scumbling, underpainting, glazing, washes, impasto, splattering and wet on wet.  I also showed the different types of brushes that affect painting marks and soft gel medium for glazing and impasto.

For our last project, I made a stop motion animation with my partner, Karli.  We decided to use one of Elliot Eisner’s “10 Lessons the Arts Teach,” using number two for our project: ”The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can
have more than one answer.^“1

After some brainstorming, we decided to use origami paper on top of a decorated sheet of paper.  The beauty of using origami is that you can make so many different things from a single sheet of paper, and it illustrates our point.  Quite simply: what can you do with a piece of paper? We first made a dog and then a cat, but the possibilities could have been endless.

10 Lessons the Arts Teach (PDF)

Watch the Arts Advocacy video by clicking below:

Karli, my collaborator, positions the paper under the iPad

¹Eisner, E.(2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach
and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Retrieved from https://www.arteducators.org/advocacy/articles/116-10-lessons-the-arts-teach.

We’re lucky enough to have a glass kiln at the art ed. studio, so we made tacked, slumped and fused glass.  You can only do up to three layers at once, but other than that there are few limitations. We scored and cut glass and crazy-glued the pieces onto the layers.  Tack bonding maintains more of the design than full fused bonding, which melts the layers together much more.  Slump fusing is at a lower temperature than full fusing, and you do that after you full fuse with a flat piece.  Safety glasses are needed and if cutting glass with little kids, placing the pieces in a bag while snipping them is ideal so no one gets hurt.

The full fused example below contains confetti, which for glass means that the layers of paper thin glass can be placed in between the thicker ones for a see-through effect.

Slumped glass in a bowl shape

Full Fused with copper hanger sandwiched between layers

Top Left, Clockwise: Full, Full and Tack fired glass