Recycle Old Crayons

In my Internet browsing session the other day, I ran across a posting written by Shannon of StalkerCreations. She had a wonderful tutorial for melting up crayons and cutting them into blocks to recycle broken and old crayons. She was glad that I wanted to link back to her post to share her idea with you. Thank goodness, because I sure need to do something with all the pieces I have in my art classroom after teaching 20 years!

Shannon's re-melted crayons remind me of a product I've actually seen in art supply catalogs called "Chunk O' Crayon". People pay money to get these! I really like the possibility that mine will have so much more color variety.
I really liked the part about cutting them like bars. Her hint was to cut them while the crayons are fully melted but still a bit warm.

Please take a look at her blog if you have the same need. I will melt up my crayons soon and take photos. I am anticipating many very creative crayon rubbings! We have several templates that have some famous art embossed into the plastic forms. Wouldn't those be nice done up in a randomly colored patterns from a good old chunk 0' crayon?

I hope you get inspired to do something similar.

My melted crayon chunks got quite a lot of attention by the kiddos in the classroom this week. I had them sitting in the foil pan and they looked like chunks of fudge! I had cut them with the crinkle cutter kitchen tool. I must say that I will try it again soon, because I think I let the melting go on too long. I would like to catch it in time to do a more marbleized swirl. Mine came out quite dark with only a little bit of a swirl. They were too far melted and the majority mixed too much making most of the pan black crayon.

Let us know if you get some nice results.

Collage and Scrap Fabrics

One of my favorite ways of working with children and the creation of art is to introduce collage as the process. I enjoy presenting a theme or topic and have the child create the image and then paint some of it, layer words in the art and paint over it, and add tiny mosaics of paper and scrap fabric. The layering works especially well in large and medium sized spaces and the collage of paper and fabrics often is most successful for the background areas.

This is the method I used when we worked on Wild Cat collages a few years ago. A little 3rd grade artist created this piece from torn paper squares, yarn and blue fabric swatches! I just adore it. The lion went to several local art shows that year. Her mother just loved how nice it looked when it was framed in a simple black frame under a piece of glass.

This fall around the end of October, my fifth graders were making Jasper Johns style flags. The students were able to layer words and song lyrics from the patriotic songs being sung at the concert right into their flags. It was such inspiring work! I liked the way this artist chose to use a variety of blue fabric wedges scattered in the field of blue!

I am so thrilled to have Wanda of Exuberant Color offer to send our school some of her finest trimmings from her quilt studio! She had written a post about cleaning up after a scrappy sewing session and I happened to comment to her on how we use fabric scraps in my art room. Thank you Wanda!

Mall Exhibit

I took a sampling of work from my students of grades 3 - 6 to the local mall for our annual Catholic Schools Exhibit. The display boards contained 2 -D work that has been completed since this fall. I am saving the sculptures and the masks for an exhibit coming up in March that has an attendant.

These 4 display boards contained the Personal Art Series done by 2 fifth grade students and 2 sixth graders. Each year since 1st grade they have made a sample drawing containing the following subjects: people, animal, building, vehicle, and plant. They may arrange it differently each time or the same. They challenge themselves to come up with a slightly different version each year as their skills and talents develop. It is fun to see this series come together as the students reach the upper elementary grades.

The idea came from a colleague of mine. She got these 2 groups started with the pencil drawings back in first and second grades. Because of her encouragement, I decided to add it to my curriculum. The children have grabbed on to the idea very well and they are amazing me with such creativity. I am so glad she didn't keep the idea to herself.

Personal Art Series by MorganM. grade 5



Personal Art Series by Ryan S. grade 5

Personal Art Series by Kellan D. grade 6

Artistic Statement: "It was really fun to make these. I hope I can keep doing them!"

Personal Art Series by Courtney F. grade 6

Artist Statement: "I like drawing in a lot of colors."

Our Eiffel Tower Paintings

I learned from my blogging friend Barb at The French Elements that the Eiffel tower was celebrating their 120 birthday. She had posted a very neat video clip of the light show that was held in the months of October through December.

Here are photos of three paintings by my 3rd grade students! Everyone had such amazing results, I'm sorry I don't have more photos included right now. I will add a link later to take you to our schools artsonia gallery.

Our Animal Molas

The mola applique pieces came out beautifully by the entire class of 4th grade students. We layered the cut outs by building upwards instead of cutting through. They designed the animal on scrap manilla paper that was cut to 9" x 12". That way most of them were large enough to be the main motif, but small enough to have room in the background for the floating repeated shapes. I am very pleased with the results.

Our school enjoyed having them hang in the cafeteria. They are now stored away as we will have a special expo at the shopping mall at the end of January and some will be shown again at the Pump House art gallery when Aquinas Schools has their elementary show.

The stacked colors really look marvelous in all of the student work. I think either the rectangle or the oval worked well for background fills. I prefer the oval, but it is a bit more work to make all these shapes. The students were aware of stacking the paper to cut more than one layer at a time.

I am glad we tried these pieces this year. It really helped enhance our studies of world art and they were enjoyed by many people the day we had our United Nations Celebration. This is a lesson I would definitely repeat.

Animals With a Mondian Grid

Earlier this school year, I introduced the third grade students to Piet Mondrian's grid paintings. We saw some reproductions of his "Broadway Boogie Woogie" and "Victory Boogie Woogie". We made note of how he gridded his canvas and used pure hues of the primary colors, red, yellow, and blue.

The students designed an animal on scrap manilla paper. I told them to draw it so at least 3 parts of the animal touched the edge of the paper. They cut these out to use as a pattern on the white cardstock. They transfered just the outline of the animals contour shape. Inside the animal the students drew straight lines in permanent ink to form a grid. They began forming a pattern of squares and rectangles and colored each space separately. Many found out that it was easier to color a few squares while they had the marker uncapped. Then open the next color and color some more. In the end they needed to be more careful, because we tried to not color the same color in an adjacent square. Black and white were part of the design too! We framed these up on black backgrounds with cut squares and rectangles of the primary colors.

The original idea came from an article in the arts and activities magazine. I believe I saw the article posted on the website. Here is a link that will take you to the article called "Animals With a Mondrian Twist".

It was a successful lesson and the children were happy with the results. I was pleased to hang them with some beautiful flag art for the Veteran's Day program we had at school on November 11th.

If you'd like to see the entire class's work follow this link to our school's artsonia webpage.

Replica of "The Scream"

Our students recently helped complete a mural version of Edvard Munch's famous Scream painting. We used the Portfolio brand oil crayons as suggested in the directions and we couldn't be more pleased with the final outcome. It was a wonderful addition to our Harvest Concert and it now has a special space in the gallery/hallway between the art and music classroom.


If you are interested, Kathy Barbro of Art Projects for Kids blog has many other fine murals download and print for just a small fee. I printed on heavy cardstock and glued our mural with tacky PVC glue. We painted the border with a metalic gold acrylic, for the museum framed look.



I don't know for sure which mural we'll do next, but I am sure we will do another one or two before end of the school year! Perhaps we will try her new Christmas Nativity and then do the Seurat's Sunday afternoon one this spring.