Textures and Illusions

The Craft-o-saurus Rex has been at it again. (Yes, that’s me.) Dreaming up art projects for kids big and small. These days I’m posting lessons online and I’m trying to create projects that do not require unusual supplies. After all, we are homebound and most students don’t have clay at home. But if you have paper and a pencil, you’re an artist. Yes, you heard it here.

The younger students learned how to do texture rubbings with crayons. My older students blew me away with their Op Art projects.

In case you have not done crayon rubbings before, it’s fun for artists of all ages (2 to 102, and beyond!). Texture rubbing is done by placing paper over a surface that has a raised pattern. To transfer the texture, you take a pencil or crayon and color back and forth over the paper until you see the texture emerge onto your paper. I encouraged my students to become detectives, hunting indoors and outside for raised texture. You can make texture rubbings over sidewalks, chicken wire, Legos, sneaker tread, kitchen utensils, raised metal or plastic or wooden details, to name only a few ideas. There are endless options and part of the fun is looking around for textures. After making several rubbings, I asked the students to cut their samples into pieces and make a collage using the different patterns. I absolutely love how imaginative they were.

Now for the older kids. They learned about Op Art, a movement that began in the 1960s. It’s short for Optical Art, and the idea is that on a two-dimensional surface, the artist uses line, shape, colors and shading to produce optical illusions. Some Op art appears three-dimensional, and some even appears to move.

Full disclosure: I adapted this Op Art lesson from one I found online by a teacher named Mrs. Filmore (artwithmrsfilmore.com). There are some great art lessons online and I chose hers. I added to it by including my own tips on how to shade and highlight.

I want to put the spotlight on my hard-working students because no matter how good a lesson plan is, if the students don’t care or don’t try, you’re not going to get great results. Furthermore, this would have been a hard lesson to do even if we were in the classroom, where I could help them in person. Having them follow my recipe in printed form online is harder. It requires their attention and patience. I’m so proud that some of my least attentive, most talkative kids buckled down and produced beautiful art. You can tell that the students took a lot of time to finish their work. My estimate is that some took several hours.

This project was intended for students in grades 5-8, although one ambitious fourth grader did it, too.

The student were given a choice. They could freestyle their own Op art or do the lesson I posted on Converging Lines, which features at least six triangular sections that appear to be curved like cones, and meet in the distance.  Many of the art pieces you will see below are similar, but I chose to include lots of them because this project was such a challenge and the kids really knocked it out of the park.

There are a few more projects I want to share in coming weeks. So don’t go anywhere (as if you have a choice!), because I will be back soon with more Adventures in Art…