In the Art Room: A Light Up Mural

Disclaimerness (please excuse me, but I have ness-disease. Meaning I must add a ness/ish/ify at the end of nearly every otherwise boring word or else I don't feel complete. Ish.): This here Light Up Mural was created last year and I never got around to sharing it with y'all. Since winter will be upon us before you know it, I thought now would be a super awesome glittery good time to post it. So there. Disclaimerism over. 

I know many of y'all create murals with your students. My students have created grid murals, collaged murals and one giant We-Are-the-World inspired self-portrait mural. They can be pretty labor-intensive for both the kids and the poor art teacher who has to crawl around on her knees hot gluin' the thing together but in the end, they are totes worth it. The visual impact is stunning, says me. And this here light up mural was one of my faves. But before we get to that, lemme show you some murals of mural-tastic past along with some linky-loos for your link-clicking pleasure. 

This Monet-inspired mural was created by my kindergarten through second grade students. We created it at the end of the school year, using scraps and painted papers. This was a great mural to hang up at the end of the school year as it kept the school cheery throughout the summer and into the start of a new school year. All the details can be found here. 

If you are an art teacher and you've been on pinterest for 5 minutes that you've seen that rainbow self-portrait mural. Shoot, you prolly even had your kids create one. I know I did. It was the start of my mural-makin' disease. This mural was created by my students the following year. We had a "travel the world" theme and this was how we kicked it off. Now, I ain't gonna lie, it was a beast to put together. That's why I happily passed that task off to some green college kids who came in to my room to "observe" (which for me translates to "cheap labor"). Full story here, friends. 

 If this flowery dot mural looks familiar, that's cuz we just made it this school year! It presently hangs outside my art room and I absolutely love it. It brings a smile my face every morning. And it truly was a snap to create. Read more here, please. 

This mural was actually the inspiration for the light up mural. In fact, you can find even more details on how the light up mural was created by going here as I prolly did a better job of 'splainin things. 

Grid murals are a good time if you like putting together puzzles (which I don't) where the pieces don't always match (fun-ness!). However, the visual impact is pretty rad. This one hung in our school cafeteria for a while until it was replaced by this bad boy last year...

My fave grid mural to date. And this one went together much easier than Starry Night. Not to mention that each class created it's own soup can so the kids could easily find "their piece" of the soup, so to speak. Deets here. 

This mural still hangs outside my art room door and I love it. This mural project not only resulted in a giant collaborative work of art but also two separate art projects. It was like the gift that kept on giving. Lookie here and I'll show ya.

So, getting back to the mural at hand (thank you for indulging me in my stroll down Mural Memory Lane), lemme give you the rundown on who-did-whuh: kindergarten painted the sky papers after looking at a lil van Gogh; second grade created the printed trees during a short chat about texture and line; first grade made the lil collaged houses with some left over papers from a previous project and the third and fourth grade kids created the ice skaters. 

Which they did by working on sketching their roller skating buddies in P.E. class. We walked down to P.E. with our clip boards and charcoal sticks and spent about 15 minutes drawing away. Mind you, this was after a chat about gesture drawing. 

When we returned to art the following class, we chose our fave sketch, used a wooden mannequin to copy the pose seen in the sketch and created a more detailed drawing from that. Clothing was NOT optional (ahem) so that was added as well. Drawings were then traced in Sharpie and colored with colored pencils.

And then carefully cut out. Yes, we did have to tape some limps back on. I happens. We call it Art Room ER. 

Dude, the cuteness. It's burning my eyes.

With the help of some super mom volunteers, the pieces of the mural puzzle were put together. Then the sky portion was folded down. I then started cutting slits into the paper and poking some LED lights through the openings.

Like this, see?

I know, it looks like a big ole stitched scar. That's why it's on the back, y'all.

But from the front, ooh-la-la! Sparkly. The light switches are kept in a pocket located to the side of the mural. Just outta kid-reach.

Most of the time, the mural is left unlit. However, I'm excited with out it will look during December. I think it will definitely bring some holiday cheer.

And there you have it! What murals have y'all done? Have you crazy kids attempted a ceiling tile grid mural type deal? If so, would you please come to my school and teach me and the kids how to create one? Pretty please and thank you!

20 of My Favorite School-Wide Collaborative Projects!

Collaborative projects! Collaborative projects are one of my favorite things. I love them at the start of the year and the end. I love doing them with the whole school or just a grade level. I love using songs, themes, artist-inspiration...you name it. I just love collaboratives!

We've done a TON over the years and I thought I'd put them all together in one big ole blog post. So, here you go: my 20 Favorite Collabortive Projects. Be sure and click on the links, many of these have how-to videos. 

Check out this blog post on how we created several canvases in this style for our school and the school library!

Students worked in table teams to create these positive four-letter words to describe our school! 

Here's a simple, fast and fun project using clothes pens, paint and words that describe who we are!

A fun mural based on the book You Be You was created by nearly all of my students. You can learn about the process of creating our fish here. Read all about the making of the mural itself here!

Another book we used for inspiration is the book by Todd Parr called It's Okay to be Different. You can check out how we created these collages here!

The Our School Has Heart mural was a piece with a contribution from each student in the school. You can see the breakdown of who created what in this blog post. 

Our clay collaborative mural is a bright and shiny beauty that hangs in a prominent place in our school. Each student contributed something to this piece...you can read more about the process here. 

One year, we created a Village of Kindness as apart of our art show! Each student upcycled a milk carton that our cafeteria queen cleaned in the dishwasher. The students made little doors that opened and said kind words to those who peeked inside. Students worked together to create the landscape on the bulletin board. 

I love to do collaboratives at the start of the school year. I especially like ones where students celebrate our school and that set a postive tone. That was the idea behind this collaborative!

Another fun way to start the school year is with some selfies! We've created them for a monochromatic mural. You can check out the video here. 

Inspired by the artist Romero Britto, this mural was created by my students when I was out for jury duty! My sub just played the video and when I returned, I assembled the mural!

A collaborative mural that definitely made the rounds was this one! The kids loved creating the feathers and it was a beautiful thing while in the hallway but I will say...it was a lot of work to assemble. All the details here. 

My fourth graders created this collaborative one year that lives at the front entrance of our school. We even 'wrapped' it for Christmas and brought out admin out for them to unwrap it as it was hung on the wall of our school. 

We kicked off this school year with our What a Wonderful World collaborative mural. Details and video tour here. 

Here's another look of our school mural. Above that, you'll see our Learning for All collaborative!

During our field day one year, my students rotated through many art stations. One of them was this alphabet and number series. My librarian requested them and we just love how they turned out. Click here to see them framed and hung in our school library. 

Much like our monochromatic collaborative, this map collaborative was created with a self-portrait of each of my students! 

We are the tigers at my school so we do tiger-themed artwork every so often. This mural was created by first graders of all of their tiger drawings. You can find a how-to video right here!

In table teams, my third graders created a Rizzi City inspired by the artist James Rizzi. 

One year, we did super-sized works of art inspired by Andy Warhol and Vincent van Gogh! When these came together, they were stunning. All the details can be found here. 

In the Art Room: The Magritte Project, One

Ya'll might recall that we are experiencing a bit of Magritte-madness in the art room. It started when I settled upon him as our Artist of the Month, got all surreal and wore this Magritte-inspired get-up to school and decided the third grade could/should create a mural as epic as this one by our fourth grade.

And, standing at 9' X 12', weighing in at 10 lbs, I'd say this thing went beyond epic and hit Mammoth Magritte-dom. Which is perfect for my third grade as this thing is as big (and surreal) as their personality.

The whole thing started when I hung up this piece by Magritte for the kids to chat about during our "What do you SEE? THINK? WONDER?" time. When I overhead the Deep Thoughts (not by Jack Handey) of the third graders, I knew I had to create a project that turned this spark of interest into a big fat hairy fire. You know, because the Fire Marshall isn't going to lose his sh** enough when he sees that mural.

I used these couple of books to help introduce Magritte. I began by reading the fictional Dinner at Magritte's which was awesome because there is something surreal taking place in each illustration. After reading each page, we'd attempt to find just what that was. This really helped the kids understand the concept of surrealism: objects that are real but combined in such a way that they couldn't possibly be real. This was followed up with by surreal-themed art homework. Of course we had to read Mike Venezia's book on the artist. The kids love his books.

During our study of Magritte, I had the kids look at another painting of his and list all of the nouns they saw. As they said things such as bird, sky, water, ocean, sunset, clouds, etc, I wrote them down on small pieces of paper and threw them in a little box marked nouns. Then they had to come up with adjectives that described the painting and I proceeded to do the same thing. I then drew two nouns from the box and one adjective such as Clouds, Sunset, Stormy. The kids were given a small piece of paper and two minutes to create their own surreal drawing. This proved to be a short and fun assessment tool.

After that, I told the kids that we'd be creating a Mega-Magritte Mural. Now, I'm all about stressing individuality in my room, as I'm sure you are too. But we had to chat about working collaboratively on this mural. I explained to them that it was like a big ole puzzle and that we all had to work together to make the pieces fit. With that in mind, the kids were given a piece of 12" X 18" piece of paper folded in half vertically. At the top, they were to use horizontal brush strokes and paint a tint of blue while at the bottom they were to paint a shade. Once these dried, we added clouds and stars with oil pastels.

The following art class, I placed a couple different bird templates on the tables. I thought the mural would make more sense visually if all the "daytime" birds were flying in one direction and the night in the opposite. I knew that this concept might be difficult for the kids if I didn't make my directions very clear. My solution was to write Day and Night on the birds. They were to use the Day birds on their daytime sky (tracing on the back to hide those unsightly pencil lines) and the Night birds on the nighttime sky.

Now it just so turns out that this art project is going to be like a gift that keeps on giving. I love how their negative space papers look! I'm dreaming up another Magritte-inspired project for these pieces. Any thoughts on what they could collage/paint/write/draw in those negative spaces?

By the way, the trick to getting the kids to cut so that they end up with that great negative paper was to tell them that they could only cut with one point of entry. Usually I'm all about cutting off the excess paper as I cut because it gets in the way. However, after I showed them how cool the negative paper would look, they were careful to cut slowly and only have one entry and exit point cut. This initial cut was taped back together after the bird was cut out.

Now I have five 3rd grade classes with about 17 students each. At first I thought we'd need both of their birds for the mural but it turns out, they only needed to donate one. I allowed the kids to choose which one they'd like to give to the mural and which to keep for a future project (to be shared with you next week, I can't wait!).Which is why this post it titled The Magritte Project as I think we'll end up with three pieces as a result.

When finished with their cutting, I laid out huge pieces of blue paper for the kids to begin painting the clouds. We painted a lot of cloud papers. Some got used in the mural...some will be used for our display of the other Magritte-inspired masterpieces.

I used black bulletin board paper and hack-cut a horizon line. Once everything was complete, we started to day it out on the floor in the art room.

I'm fortunate that I have the floor space for such big endeavors. The other kids (and adults) were super curious about what the 3rd grade was up to, so I created this sign to help explain our work. Because, honestly, if I had to answer the question "What's that?!" one more time, I was a-gonna scream

Now most of my little friends know not to walk on artwork on the floor because in my art room, artwork is always all over the floor (I have a love-hate with my slightly-angled/can-cause-drips-and-paint-runs drying rack). So I also created some make-shift construction cones with orange paper and my gallon paint bottles. And I STILL had at least two kindergarteners walk right through the mural? Really?! Sigh.

By the way, do you see that huge roll of orange paper my mural is on? We just happen to have a ton of this stuff and it's what we've used to glue both the Warhol mural and this one two. It works great as a base to our murals. I use a combo of spray and hot glue to adhere it to the paper. It makes my room smell magical and I see stars for up to a half hour after the fact.

Magritte's Dominion of Light was also used as inspiration in the mural. A couple of my students painted that while others used circle sponges to create the dots.

I am fortunate to have some great volunteers in the art room. They worked on hot gluing the birds in place and adhering the bulletin board paper to the large roll of orange paper. With the help of one sweet volunteer, I was able to get the mammoth mural up right outside my art room door. It so fun to see whenever I leave the art room. Of course, the kids were thrilled with their hard work...even if they were under the impression that their mural should "cover up" the fourth grade one. 

Stay tuned for more Magritte-madness. Until then, enjoy your weekend and we'll chat soon!