May 27, 2012

Post as Promised

My giant things post as promised, mostly has to do with with papier-mâché. I tend to associate papier-mâché with piñatas. Do you?
An Austin party place full of piñatas. Scary, no?
One thing I love about teaching art is getting to try so many different projects. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. My 3rd and 4th grade students had spent the earlier part of May learning about the artist Wayne Thiebaud. The blog, Art for Small Hands is a great blog that I visit regularly for ideas and inspiration for my lessons. I used this lesson with my 4th grade students, but wanted to try something different for 3rd. One of my facebook friends, and grad school classmates, posted a project that she was doing with her students. It looked amazing and easy to do, so I gave it a go.
My Wayne Thiebaud inspired 3D cake.
Basically, students built pieces of cakes out of cardboard, papier-mâchéd and then painted them. It took about three lesson (45 minutes each), and I prepped their cardboard for them.

After 2nd lesson:
And their results after the 3rd lesson. I like the way they turned out. 

Once, we papier-mâchéd the cakes, I set out to make my props for my Black and Yellow performance. Wiz Khalifa sings, "everything I do, I do it big!" So, I was determined to turn these mailing tubes into big crayons and pencils. 

Here's how I did it. I took some cones from the box of yarn, made circles from scraps of mat board and glued/taped them to the top of the mailing tubes.

Looks just like a crayon form, right?

Next, I gessoed the tubes. I only gessoed because I had a few bottles in the classroom. I wasn't sure if I needed to do it, but when I went to apply the paint to the tubes, I was really happy that I did.
It made the paint colors stand out.
For the crayons, I took a crayon and measured out the design onto construction paper. I wasn't sure how this would look, but I was so happy that I did.

Because if you ask me, I think the paper really sells it as a giant crayon. 
You can check out the paint brush and pencil on stage in my video.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Love the giant crayons, have been looking to make giant pencils or crayons for my classroom. Where did you get the giant top part of the crayon, the cone?

Anonymous said...

How did your students put together the cake slice? Did they tape together 4 pieces to create the slice? or did you use a template for them to trace on to cardboard? I would love to do this project. I have been experimenting multiple ways for them to make the cake slice. Any tips or how you did it would be great please!

Unknown said...

Hi! The tops of the crayons were from some yarn stash in the room. The yarn came wrapped on these cardboard cones.

The cake slices were made from a template that I created from two rectangles, a square, and a triangle. Due to time limitations, I had the pieces pre-cut for the kids. They taped them together with masking tape and immediately started to paper-mâché the sides and decoration. This was done in one class session, and then painted in the next class session.

Hope that helps!

Helena Georgette said...

Hi,
I love the cake slice! I am going to include it in a few classes about artist Wayne Thiebaud. Your slices look so smooth. I am wondering what you used for the paste part of the paper mache.

Thank you,
Helena Georgette

Unknown said...

Hi! I replied to your comment in another comment below. Sorry about that!

Unknown said...

Hi there!
I used a powdered mix of art paste. We had a bunch of boxes on hand in the art room and it seemed to work pretty well. Elmer's makes a good one. Have fun with the project!

Unknown said...

Hi there! What size/type of construction paper did you use for the crayons? They are amazing!

Unknown said...

Hi there! What size/type of construction paper did you use for the crayons? They are amazing!

Unknown said...

Hi there! What size/type of construction paper did you use for the crayons? They are amazing!

PBLibrarian said...

Where can I find those cardboard cones?

Anonymous said...

Hello! I have been wanting to make those big crayons for the longest time! What size construction paper did you use? I want to create these for my kids’ back to school pictures. ☺️

Anonymous said...

i viewed all 11 comments for this post & was also unable to find your reply on size/type paper. can you plz reply again. thx

Anonymous said...

mailing tubes can be purchased at staples or maybe a ups store