In the Art Room: EASY Two Day Pencil Sculptures

Oh my goodness, y'all! These wee pencils were just about the easiest two day sculpture project ever...and look how stinkin' cute they are! If you follow me on Instagram, then you know all of my kiddos are creating sculptures of art supplies. So far, we've made sculpture of crayons, scissors, glue sticks and big pink erasers. I'll be sure to share all of those with you, as well as how-to videos. But today, I thought I'd share these super cute pencils that my fourth graders made in just 2 one-hour art classes! 

Here's a video I created to share the simple process!

 Day One: Our inspiration for this project is the artist Lucy Sparrow. If you are not familiar with this British artist, she created an installation that looks just like a convenience store with everything available in the store created from felt. It's AMAZING! We watched a video all about her. I told the kids that we'd be creating our own Art Supply Store for the art show. They are super stoked. 

 From there, each kid got a TP tube, a piece of tagboard and a couple pieces of masking tape. After tracing a template for the cone of the pencil, the kids cut it out and rolled the cone. That proved to be the part that was the most difficult. When I found a couple kids who could roll cones, I put them on cone-patrol. After the cones were rolled and secured with tape, they were taped to the top of the tube.

Once the armature was complete, the kids were given about 5-6 pieces of plaster to completely cover their pencils. I really like Rigid Wrap. I did emphasize not adding too much water so the tube would not collapse under the weight of the water. Also, if the plaster gets twisted or "messed up", according to the kids, they have to unravel and smooth it out. The plaster wrap is not cheap so I really stress using only 5-6 pieces and not wasting any. Then we set these on styrofoam plates with our names on and allow to dry.

If plaster wrap is not available, you could always use papier mache. We did that when we created these pencils and crayons a couple of years ago! 

 Day Two: The following art class, we watched this video that the kids LOVED. Learning how a pencil was made really struck a cord with them. From there, we painted our pencils using yellow, pink, light brown and black. Once they were finished painting the pencil, they set it aside to dry and began working on the ferrule. 

The ferrule was created with metal tooling. I cut the tooling down to 1" X 7". The kids created their design and I hot glued it to the pencil. The kids were thrilled how cute, small and realistic their wee pencils looked! Now they are all about creating more art supply sculptures.