a great way to collect your paper experiments

 

 

 

 

 

Our sampler books contain many of the handmade paper explorations we’ve done in class, linked here, such as Turkish, Suminagashi, shaving cream, Prang Ambrite pastel, rice or cornstarch paste paper, and handmade recycled paper.  I listed corn husk and papyrus paper below as well, which were all really fun.  I included many different types of drawing papers tucked away inside.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Inside we placed other papers suitable for watercolor and drawing, such as marker, pastel, illustration and various drawing papers.  These will come in handy when I’m thinking about new drawing projects for the kids and trying to decide which paper for them to use.

This is a form of binding which is suitable for small books that are not too thick, maybe an inch or less.  It’s a simple and elegant way to bind pages together.

Here is some recycled paper made from soaking bits of paper overnight and then chopping up in a blender until they are fairly smooth.  You need to add a fair amount of water when doing this.  If you use a rag paper as an additive (in small quantities), you should use 100% cotton since it’s easier to work with.  After using a shaped screen and sponging the water out, it was fun to play with various colors and silver leaf bits as well.  You can add botanicals like flowers or seeds if you wish, during the screening process.

 

Other paper experiments: Corn Husk & Papyrus

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We made corn husk paper out of husks which are soaked in soda ash and cooked for 2 hours, which breaks up the fibers.  For this process you need to use gloves, a dust mask and good ventilation as well as only a stainless steel or enamel pot.  It can be quite toxic. Our teacher did this part for us. Then, you lay out the husks on a couch sheet to absorb the water, close together like weaving.  Afterwards, you press the papers together on a blotter paper or flower type press.

For the papyrus paper, we began by using veggie peelers and removing the green parts of the papyrus entirely until the white core remained.  Then, we peeled the white parts into smaller units and crushed under a rolling pin and blocks of wood to increase the surface area.  We soaked these a couple of days in water. After weaving these together, leaving some holes since that’s what I like, they were dried for quite a few days under some heavy weights. It takes three days to dry the green and six if you use the white parts.

 

diving into new sketchbook Lessons from classmates

For our Art Education Studio class, each of us concocted sketchbook ideas that are out of the ordinary, centered around drawing.  During each week of class, we are creating one of these problem-based assignments that are open-ended with some boundaries for concepts, techniques and materials.

For our introduction to the class assigned by our teacher, I made an identity map with concepts and events from my life. I used circles to represent the spirals of things I’ve lived through and as a shape of continuity and wholeness in each time period. The only parameter was to draw a 3 inch square in the middle and go from there.

Assignment 1 was a self-portrait made using a reflective surface other than a mirror with 16 crayons.  I used my computer screen which is a memorial to my grandpa, so I can see him everyday.  I layered the crayons and melted them off with an iron with a paper on top.  Then I went back in with a knife and scraped some more off before adding additional crayon.

The second one I made was three animals pieced together that was alive now or had been at one point, each with a different drawing medium. This became a narwhal-snake-flying squirrel creature of land, earth and sky.  I used crayon, colored pencil and marker.

For this assignment, we made Google doodles about ourselves that might appear on the homepage for Google search.  I made this out of marker and it shows an archeological dig, a balloon, cookware and a pool, among other things, showing my interests.

For this one, we made an initial design for a pumpkin to be auctioned off at Shelter House, a local organization that helps the homeless.  I used acrylic paint.  Actual pumpkin decoration linked here: https://arted.tessasutton.com/2018/09/20/pumpkin-auction-at-shelter-house.

In this assignment, I created a composition without using traditional drawing materials.  Here, I used milkweed I gathered on one of my many walks near my home and some scraps of yarn.  I glued them on.

In #6, our parameters were to draw a place from imagination using lots of rich color and detail.  Using chalk colored pencils, I drew the Mariana Trench which is located off Guam.  I’m interested in the stillness and quiet found there as well as a sense of the unknown.

This one was about drawing a part of our body’s shadow cast by a light and then placing colors  around it that we identified with.  I chose markers and made shapes, thinking of a quilt around my hand.

Using vine charcoal rubbed over the paper and then erased with a gummy eraser, I placed an object obscuring the view and then drew the scene. I went back in with a compressed charcoal, which is darker, to make the darks more absorbing. This gives you a background, middle and foreground.

For this assignment, we used a stencil to make an illuminated letter of our choice that we made a lino-cut out of, which you can see here.  I have an interest in social studies, so I created a re-make of Ben Franklin’s, Join or Die (1754), in relation to the colonies uniting for the French-Indian Wars.  This was later co-opted by the American Revolution as a banner against England.  I’m using this to say that democrats and republicans should rise up together against the evils of the day.

This is the sketch for a dry point etching on plexiglass that we made in class. It relates to a personal story of traveling. You can see the finished intaglio here.

In this sketch assignment, we needed to have 10 monster parts of different categories such as horns, eyes, noses, feet, etc.) I rolled a die to give me the number for each part.   This is in marker.  I thought this lesson would be great for elementary and junior high and gets your creative monster juices flowing.

In this assignment, I drew a dried out milkweed with pods that I found on a walk because we were supposed to draw something from nature using complementary colors showing value and form. I used Stabilo pastel colored pencils, which I like to use because they blend easily.  I used orange and blue with a light periwinkle as a shadow to provide definition and context.

For this one, we were supposed to create something impossible that could potentially be possible, relating to some aspect of the natural. I chose to make a teleportation device.  We could not only move ourselves from place to place without greenhouse emissions from transportation, but also move materials easily.  You would never be late to work or school again, and you could live anywhere in the world with no commute.

For this lesson, which was my lesson that I submitted, I had my classmates use a fragment of an image taken by chance from the internet based on sentences or phrases in the last work they made and generate a new drawing incorporating some aspect of a poem from a poem generator online. Steps are below. Drawing materials and techniques were their choice. My example is in pastel and pencil.  I used an image of the Spanish Flu from WWI after googling “forgotten American history.”  I made sort of a Pandora’s box in the shape of a bottle.

1. Look back at your last piece of completed art and describe it with a phrase or sentence that you associate with it, poetic and/or conceptual. Use more than one word.
2. Go into Google search and type in your phrase and see what comes up under images.
3. Choose 6 images and roll a die, assigning each a number. If you don’t have a die, you can randomly pick a number.
4. Print out this image In any size you like and cut into 4 equal parts. Close your eyes and chose a section. Paste or tape this into your sketchbook.
5. Using a poem generator, add phrases that you used earlier.
6. Incorporate the image and poem concepts as you see fit.

 

Kids can easily make these simple, yet clever, folded book projects.

The first is a portfolio that has secret pockets to hide things in.  This one is about 3 x 6 inches folded up and 8.5 x 11 inches open,  but you can make them any size. There is a cover page and inside paper, folded about 9 times, total.

 

 

Kids can do drawings inside the pockets to reveal hidden artwork and then fold up the base if they don’t want people to see it!

 

 

 

These would be fun for around 2nd or 3rd grade for smaller artwork, scraps of images to save or a place to doodle.

 

 

 

 

 

This folded city was made out of one piece of construction paper with the cuts down the middle of the page about 3/4 of the way to the edge then folded back so it has a little support in back to prop it up.  This can be done with all kind of shapes. It could be interesting in tandem with a science activity about symmetry.