Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Dream Rocket at the Franklin Institute

During the last couple weeks of school, some of my 5th graders had a chance to work on panels for the Dream Rocket Project's exhibit at the Franklin Institute. The theme is "Your Night Sky". When my students have worked on the Dream Rocket project in the past, the students have totally designed the panels. Since this was created in the very last art class of the year, I had the main part of the designs planned out before the students arrived.
 I used two different views of the Kansas State Capitol, the first showing most of the building, and the second zoomed in on the statue on top of the dome. The copper on the dome has recently been replaced so it's odd for me to see it a warm copper instead of the green I was so used to!
The metallic colored pencils came in handy for the drawing of the capitol.

White colored pencils were used to finish the rest of the building and add constellations (we weren't worried about accurate placement). A green color stick worked well for the tree.
The painting zoomed in on the statue was made with tempera paint. To save time, both panels were created on black butcher paper. It just made more sense than starting with white paper and painting it all black.
These panels will be displayed at the Franklin Institute next December and will eventually be combined with thousands Dream Rocket panels from all over the world to wrap the Saturn V Moon Rocket at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. This project is a global collaborative effort and I'm so excited to see the end result! When one of my students asked why they want to put the artwork on a rocket, I explained that a rocket is a great symbol for dreaming big. Not that long ago it was thought impossible to go into space or land on the moon. The mission to the moon was a BIG DREAM that came true, through science and hard work. The Dream Rocket is trying to help turn STEM into STEAM!

1 comment:

  1. This is awesome Katie! Make sure to include this in a Word Doc and email it to me so that I can include it in our Dream Big issue 2 in August. :)

    ReplyDelete