Art Lady

Teachervision has a great page on papermaking . There are also some creative paper making/pulp related lesson plans on the Dick Blick website. The Knox Gallery has another cool lesson plan.
In my classroom I used Arnold Grummer molds that I bought from Dick Blick that are inexpensive. I have had them for over 5 years and they hold up really well in the water. I recommend his instructional videos!

Definition – Papermaking is the process of making paper, a substance which is used ubiquitously today for writing and packaging.
In papermaking a dilute suspension of fibers in water is drained through a screen, so that a mat of randomly interwoven fibers is laid down. Water is removed from this mat of fibers by pressing and drying to make paper. Most paper is made from wood pulp, but other fiber sources such as cotton and textiles may be used.

Making Handmade Paper Video series on Ehow.com

Handmade Paper Pulp Mixing — powered by eHow.com

I first took a workshop by ALL FIRED UP two years ago. I have since fused flat glass pieces in my kiln. I am currently reading a book I bought on amazon.com called Warm Glass.  I am looking forward to making some glass pieces in a slump mold for Christmas.

Resources

• Molds for Slumping are available online at slumpys.com
• There are some basic getting started kits available at dickblick.com
• The Corning Museum of Glass is a great website. They also have a number of videos on You Tube (which is blocked by some school system’s software unfortunately)

We have been hard at work in the art room at HAMMS.  My 7th and 8th grade majors have done a few fused glass pieces thanks to a generous donation by Ellenburg & Shaffer Glass Art Studio. My 7th grade elective students have been hard at work making contour line drawings. My 6th graders are working on touring the Elements of Design and are creating some very colorful shape collages.

Some of this work will be displayed at the Dixie Classic Fair in October. I have posted some of their work online at Artsonia.

In an effort to fund raise and having more time with my majors this year, I am looking at Fimo beads. I have found several websites that I like:

• Polymer Clay Beads
• How to make Fimo Beads
• Lentil Swirled Beads

I can’t wait to do this with my students!

I taught how to make Mola’s my first 2 years of teaching, but haven’t done it in 3 years, so I thought now was the time. There is a great lesson plan at the Incredible Art Department and at Dick Blick under their multi-cultural lesson plans Professor Wimberly has a great .pdf file on the net of the History of the Cuna Indians and their Mola making.
What are Mola’s? Molas are women’s blouses made by the Kuna of northeastern Panama. The mola tradition is only about a hundred years old, but it is very important to the identity of the Kuna. The patterns originated in body paint and are made of many layers of bright cloth cut and stitched to create complex designs. The designs are often based on plants and animals and even events that are important in the lives of the Kuna as well as on things from the outside world, like Tony the Tiger from cereal boxes and images from basketball games or from greeting cards. This mola uses red, yellow and blue, colors that were used in body painting. –Marty, Potawatomi

An excellent website is the Art of Being Kuna @ the National Museum of the American Indian.
There is an article that needs some work on Wikipedia on the Cuna Indians.
We will be using scissors to make our Mola’s because I don’t have enough X-acto knifes.

mola

I have a workshop coming up and needed a one hour project. I immediately thought of book making. Simple book making because we don’t have alot of time for sewing singatures, etc. I found two great websites. The first is Bookbinding by Brian Sawyer and the second is the Incredible Art Department’s Paper Making and Book Making page. Brian Sawyer’s site is for those that want to sew books. The Handmade Paper page is an excellent resource for teachers who want one stop shopping. I found a link to the San Diego Museum of Art and they have excellent lesson plans for making artists books such as the Accordian book, Star book, Flag book, Flutter book,  Tunnel book and others. There are some great videos on YouTube by Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord or skgaylord she is also on TeacherTube. She also has a website with free projects.

So I printed out a frog template that jumps and we made it. And then Jesus A. made a much better frog, that put my frog to shame! I have been desperately searching for a pattern to use at the Magnet Fair tomorrow to no avail. I did however use the advance search feature on google to get rid of all the video entries I found when I searched for origami frog pattern. I found some cool instructions (a large .pdf file) at origami instructions.com

What is cool is that in some classes, the students can race the frogs and measure to see who is the winner. This integrates math! Also, I read somewhere that frogs can jump like 10 times there length. Neat. I wonder if that’s true.

I have been been trying to follow some of the diagrams in the origami books I checked out in my school’s library, but have been having some trouble. So, since I am a visual learner, I decided to have a look on youtube to see what their origami videos were like. Man, oh man, I hit the jackpot! Roses, rings, snapping crocodiles, cranes, beating heats, you name it! But of course, we can’t see You Tube videos at our school, so I stopped by Teacher Tube. Here is an origami video I found of a crane.

My goal is too add an origami section to the craft page… or just make it’s own page from the craft page. If there was only more time in the day….

Wait stop the presses!!! There is an origamitube! http://www.origamitube.com

Another good website is Alex Bateman’s origami models. I will have to re-visit the site to check out the tesselation paper models.