Post It Mural- 3 Stooges

 This year our League Art exhibition and competitions were held virtually. One of the options for the competition was a post-it note mural. I have a couple students who are pretty interested in pixel art so I put them in charge of coming up with a plan. It was supposed to be something "iconic" so they chose the 3 Stooges, then had to translate it to colors that we had available. I ended up having to borrow some post-its and cut some similar colored paper into squares when we started to run out but I think it turned out great! The biggest challenge was staying lined up with multiple people working at the same time. It did not work out to start at opposite sides even though we thought we measured carefully, so there was lots of revision. All in all, they were proud of their artwork and that's what counts!

Here's a time lapse video of the construction!

Group photo of some of the artists!

Virtual Art Show 2020-2021

 This year our League Art show was held virtually. Since I already had photographs for all of that artwork, I decided to add in some more artwork that wasn't finished in time or couldn't fit in the limited number of entries for League and share it as our school's virtual art show. I'm requesting to show these before the awards programs for middle and high school since I didn't keep artwork at school for a physical show.

Enjoy!

Mail Art

I had participated in Artist Trading Card swaps through the mail before but never thought about swapping bigger artwork until I watched a video session on Mail Art at the 2020 Virtual KAEA Fall Conference. Since most of my high school classes are graphic design mixed with traditional media, it seemed like a great opportunity to touch on mixed media and text.

I was home with one of my kids in quarantine when this lesson was introduced so having a recorded demo embedded in the slides presentation worked great.

The rest of the images are my examples. They are all either 4x6 or 5x7 inches made on a tag board base.

I posted in the Kansas Art Teachers facebook group and found another school to swap with! Their art teacher and I also swapped so that was really fun. I would totally recommend doing a mail art project!

 

Ice Dyed T-Shirts

One of the workshops at the 2020 KAEA Virtual Fall Conference was about how to ice dye. I had wanted to give my graphic design students to make an actual product they could use and knew they would like the look of ice dyeing, so this lesson was born!

For the first part, the students designed a logo for the Heart of Jackson Humane Society that could be used on a t-shirt as a client project. 

Next, they had the chance to design their own t-shirt. The theme was open and the design was limited to one color- black- because that is what we had available for iron-on vinyl. Art Club paid for the shirts and we got a great deal since a local t-shirt shop offered to order plain white tees for us at cost. This worked out really well since I didn't have to worry about students bringing their shirts on time or bringing shirts that did not have enough cotton to accept the dye.

While students were designing, we started dyeing shirts. The ice took so long to melt that I had to ask what colors the students wanted and start sprinkling the colors on in the morning. Now that I know how long it takes, I will plan my timeline differently in the future so students can apply the powdered dye themselves.

1. Soak the t-shirts in soda ash water for at least 15 minutes

2. Ring out the shirt and arrange bunched up on a cooling rack, wire basket, etc. so the water can drip through

3. Pile ice on the shirt, trying to cover everything- this can take a little practice to get the ice stacked up

4. Sprinkled on powdered dye- we used jacquard procion dye, about a tablespoon total per shirt, so if you use 3 colors, a teaspoon of each. We did not measure this precisely because I didn't have measuring spoons at school and the spoons borrowed from my clay tools wouldn't fit in the little jars. We stuck the handle of the spoon in and scooped some out, sometimes sprinkling a bit more dye if it looked too pale as the ice melted.

5. Wait until the ice melts

6. When ice is totally melted, rinse the shirts until the water runs clear. Ring it out and rinse it again to be safe.

FYI- if you use a blow dryer to melt the ice the colors don't seem to be as vibrant as if you let the ice melt on its own.

Students created their designs in Photoshop then turned in a jpeg so I could import it to Silhouette studio and cut it out with my portrait on heat transfer vinyl. I learned to order the easy weed vinyl in the future and to do a small test cut to check the depth and number of passes required. The default was not enough for the HTV I ordered so it took some testing to get the right combination.

There were two shirts that the student and I both looked over and didn't notice small missing words like the "in" that should be before affliction. We won't make that mistake again! We ended up trying to match the size and patched it in.

Some students went with just lettering while others went with illustrations.

The students were pretty pumped about their shirts. I asked everyone to wear them on the same day so we could take a group picture. Here is one class: