Landscape Inchies Part 1

I recently completed this project during a residency.  I was working with Grade 4/5.  They were studying 6 different regions of Canada so we completed 6 inchies to represent these.

They then chose their favourite 3 and these were mounted on a 1"x 6" board that was cut into a 12" length.

I love collections.  I'm always looking to pull student work together into a collection.

Here are the other 3.



Inchie posts always have a lot of pictures so I'm going to do this in 2 parts.  The 'how to' for the first 3 inches right now and then the second set later in the week.



Can you guess the 6 geographical regions?










MATERIALS REQUIRED:

- wc paper cut into 3" x 3" squares, you need 6 for each student
- disk tempera paint
- acrylic paint in black, red, light green, white
- a 1"x 6" board cut into 1 foot lengths, a 8ft board costs around $4.40 so each board is about 55 cents
- textured wallpaper
- green painter's tape
- corrugated cardboard cut into small pieces
- snow writer or white puffy paint
- metal duct paint
- salt shaker
- iridescent glitter glue
- thin cardboard, like from a cereal or cracker box
- drywall filler
- tacky glue





PROCEDURE:

When I do this with the kids we work on several inchies at the same time.  Whenever we need some drying time we just move on to another inchie.

Here I will present each inchie from start to finish.
Prairie or Grasslands Inchie
I have this textured wallpaper I use a lot. It has lines in it.  I buy it from either Home Depot or Walmart and a roll lasts a long time.
Give each student a small square, about 1.5" x 1.5", but I did not measure these.  Have them paint it with red acrylic paint.  You need to use acrylics for this wallpaper as tempera does not stick well enough.
Set aside to dry.

Take a piece of green painter's tape and your first inchie.

Tape the lower section of your inchie.

This will mark off your horizon line.

Paint the upper part a nice blue.

While the paint is still wet take a kleenex, scrunch it up a bit, and lift off a few clouds.

Set aside to dry.

When blue paint is dry, remove tape. Paint in ground area with brown disk tempera.




Let dry.

Give each student a small piece of corrugated cardboard.

Have them dip edge in light green acrylic paint and make the wheat lines on top of brown paint.  You don't want to totally cover the brown.

Let dry.

Take the textured wall paper you painted red, turn over and draw a grain elevator shape.  I had reference photos for the kids.  Cut out.

I printed off the Alberta Wheat Pool logo for each kid, (email me if you need this).

Have them cut it out and glue onto the grain elevator.

Glue into place on the horizon line.




That's it for that inchie.  I did a larger project just like this one.  You can find it here.

Arctic Inchie

Draw 3 lines on the lower half of an inchie.  You want it to look like snowdrifts.

Using a snow writer or a white puffy paint pen go over these lines.


Set aside to dry.

Cut a silver full moon out of the metal duct tape.  Remove backing and stick in place.

Paint in the sections with purples and blue.  You can paint over top of the moon it will just resist the paint.

While paint is still wet add a sprinkle of salt.  Sometimes we can get a neat effect where the salt reacts with the paint, when dry and brushed off it looks like it's snowing.  It doesn't always work but it's worth a try.

Add a little snow glitter to the bottom of the inchie. With the kids I just used some iridescent glitter glue.






Let dry.

Using white and black acrylic paint and a fine brush add a little polar bear.  I told the kids make a white oval, add legs, paint in a nose and an eye.





That's it for this one.  I have a larger project that this based on, you can check it out here.

Cordillera Inchie

I gave each kid a piece of cereal box that was the approximately the same size as the inchie.

I asked them to draw a mountain range from one side to the other in pencil.


Cut out.

Coat the cardboard with a layer of drywall filler.

Set aside to dry. (about 6 hrs.)

Paint inchie blue.



Let dry.

Paint the drywall mountain with some grey and black acrylic paint.  If you didn't reserve any white for those snowy mountains you can add some white.

Put some glue onto the back of the mountains.

Glue into place on the blue inchie.  Leave some space at the bottom.

Mix a nice blue/green colour with the disk tempera and paint in that lower part. (right overtop the previous blue paint).





That is your mountain lake.

Take a strip of that textured wall paper.  Paint with 2 colours of green (light and dark), you want a marbled effect.


Let dry.

Cut a jagged line diagonally across the strip.  This is your tree line.  Glue into place along the lower edge of your mountains.

That's it for this inchie.

3 regions done 3 to go.  Check back later this week for part 2.


Gail

Toucan Portraits

I completed a month long residency on Thursday.  I had a great time working with 18 classes on a wide range of projects.



Here is one that we did, rain forest Toucans.

Here are some of the student's work.














MATERIALS REQUIRED:

- substrate, we are using 1/8"  hardboard, also called MDF.  It is the stuff I use for art boards.  Ours is cut to a 12"x12" square and works out to be 31 cents each, so it's a bargain.  Home Depot will cut the large sheets for you with their fancy cutting machine.
- cardboard, heavy corrugated or thin
- template
- drywall filler
- wax paper
- brown, green, black, yellow, red, orange, blue acrylic paint
- black paper
- recycled paper
- pipe cleaner
- black pony bead or goggly eye
- tacky glue
- Mod Podge
- black yarn

PROCEDURE:

Paint board green.  This is just the background.  You could vary the colours a bit if you want.


Set aside to dry.

Cut the Toucan pieces out of cardboard.  Here is my template.

You also need to cut a branch for your bird to sit on.

Cover one side of the cardboard with drywall filler.  Make sure the beak and bird will match.  Despite our best efforts we still had birds that did not match the beaks. (wrong side)
Leave overnight to dry.

When the drywall is dry start painting your pieces.

Paint the branch brown with a touch of black for the shaded parts.

Paint the body of your bird black.  At school the kids painted the entire body black. That was the end of that session.  Next session they added colour on top, acrylics are quite opaque so it worked well.

Paint face and breast.

Paint a brightly coloured beak.

I gave the kids about 1/3rd of a white pipe cleaner.  They then painted it the colour they wanted the feet to be.  You could just use multi-coloured ones.

Let all pieces dry.

To make leaves I handed out some thin corrugated paper I had.  It was the packing material from a box of dishes that I had saved.

You could also use a crimper or just paint some recycled paper with different shades of green and yellow.

Let dry.

When all pieces are dry start the assembling.

Cut some nice leaf shapes out of green paper. Glue into place.  Glue branch into place.  At this time figure out where bird is going to sit.  Using black paper add the tail onto the board.  You could also use black paint.

Glue bird into place, beak, and feet.

Add eye.

You can add some yarn for the line between the beaks.

Finally add a coat of Mod Podge to seal everything into place and add a nice shiny coat.

Great work, everyone.

See you next time.

Gail

Peruvian Masks

As part of my current residency I did these masks with Grade 2/3 today.






They are studying Peru in Social Studies so we are investigating the gold masks of the Inca.

This was an excellent lesson.  We completed most of the project in a 1 hr session.

Here are some of the masks that we made today.  We still have to add the sequins and coloured paper.

MATERIALS REQUIRED:

- canvas board or rectangular piece of heavy cardboard, ours are 6"x8"
- black and gold acrylic paint
- scraps of thin and thick cardboard, paper rolls
- little wood cubes (Dollar store), little wood sticks (Dollar store)
- doilies
- tacky glue
- rick rack and trim
- gold and silver sequins
- black and turquoise paper
- scissors

PROCEDURE:

I handed out the boards and we put our names on the back with sharpie.

Working on top of wax paper or newspaper, each student painted the canvas board with black acrylic paint.

Set aside to dry.

I gave each student an oval cut from corrugated cardboard.  This is the base of the face.

They then collected materials from the recycled stash.  I pre cut the heavy pieces of cardboard into smaller more manageable pieces.

We built up our mask details and glued them on with tacky glue.

Student work in process.

When it is all glued down we painted the whole thing with gold acrylic paint.

Embellish with sequins and bits of coloured paper.


At school we skipped this step as we were out of time and just glued our masks to the base board.

For my sample I put glue on the back of the mask but at school the masks were still wet so we put the glue on the black boards (they were dry by the time our masks were painted), and then placed the mask on top of the glue.

We'll do our embellishing at school next week.



Great job Grade 2/3!





Gail