5th Grade Jungles! Mixed Media Reductive Printmaking with Oil Pastel and Paint!

One of the big projects this year for our 5th graders is to make a reductive print.  I'm never totally happy how these come out, and this year I decided to walk back to the beginning of my career, when I tackled jobs that were huge and unwieldy and sucked all the air out of my body.  I pulled out a lesson about Henri Rousseau; students would print a jungle background, research jungle plants and animals, draw both on different pieces of paper, paint and embellish with oil pastel, and then make them into bas relief layers by putting rolls of paper beneath each level.  It was kinda cool to see it all come together.  Took a while but the kids loved it.  Nearly everyone said that they never dreamed that the pieces would come together to look as good as they did--lots of pride in their work!

First, we talked about Rousseau--that he was self-taught, worked as a customs agent, and that he told people he fought in the jungles of Mexico, and saw all these wild animals.  In reality, he spent a lot of time at the botanical gardens sketching plants, and at the zoo, sketching the animals.

The plants and animals that show up in his paintings are sometimes incongruous with where they live in actuality, and size is a decision made with artistic license (personally, I just want to see a guy riding a tiger, playing the ukulele, in real life).

Beginning with a reductive print, students followed up with an underpainting for their background.

 Adding the background features helped to show depth.

Students followed their underpaintings with oil pastel embellishments on the background.

   Looking at real jungle plants, they drew, painted, and then applied 

oil pastel on strips of  paper that later would be cut out  and used as a first layer. 

Testing out the look of the animal on the background, before assembly

The finished products were amazing.  Students cut 1/2 " strips of paper and rolled them around a marker to make rolls to place in between layers.  They situated their plants and then decided where their animals would go.  Like Rousseau, some of them took artistic license and made animals that don't actually live in the jungle.  

The results were pretty exciting.

5th Grade Reductive Prints, and Drawing Challenges

It's feast or famine with me.  I don't know how some folks manage to blog all the time.  Do they not have life stuff that happens?  Do they sleep?  I'm looking at going to our Thanksgiving break, and I'm determined to post some stuff that we've done this semester.  Gearing up to start Choice- Based Art in the second semester, we are doing all kinds of challenges so that we've used our various art supplies/mediums prior to me letting them loose with the whole Art Room at their disposal. 


The first major challenge after the drawing challenge of our sketchbook covers was to make reductive foam prints.  I showed them a PowerPoint on intaglio printing, and discussed how Styrofoam printmaking is sort of like intaglio, since we scratch our image into our plates.  If you're interested in the PowerPoint, you can email me at paschal@fultonschools.org.


We started out by doing a mind map in our sketchbooks.  Given a choice of 6-7 words, students developed a four-pronged mind map that had four legs/words and led to at least four degrees of separation from the beginning word they chose.  Their choices were:  courage, laughter, honesty, morning, curious, quiet, green.  Here's an example of one student's mind map:


If they wanted to, they could have more than 4 words off from the original word, and they could go more than  4 degrees of separation.  This student chose to make her print about clothes.  

The students all agreed that having the mind map really made a difference in how they chose their subject matter for their prints.  This was a great way to get them to think in new directions and to choose something that had some real meaning to them.  It made for some interesting choices.


Once they got their ideas solidified, they drew a picture of their planned print on a half-sheet of copy paper. The foam plates we were using were 6" x 12," so they it helped them to know what size their picture would be for their print.  I reminded them to keep from making too many little details, as they did not translate well onto the printing plate later on.   They also had to make sure that they made any words backwards, as they would be printed forwards when they pulled the print.  Most of them used tracing paper to make their drawings, if they wanted to put words on their plates.  I tried to discourage it, though, as it's so easy to make the mistake of putting one letter backwards...


Once they got their drawing finished, I gave them a foam plate and a ballpoint pen.  They put their drawing on top of the plate and then traced, with a lot of pressure, onto the plate. Afterward, they went back and retraced their lines on the plate, so that it would be deep enough to keep from getting filled with ink.

Sometimes the ballpoint pen does not leave a mark with the ballpoint ink, but as long as the image is pressed deeply, that doesn't really matter.

They began their printing process.  I like to use phone books and catalogs to put the printing plates on when they are inking; it keeps the table from being a crazy mess.  Once they finish inking, they have to turn the page for the next person.  

I set up two colors on one side of the table, two colors on the other side, and a third color at a different table.  Kids go up to the colors they need, ink their plates at the inking table, and then take the plate back to their own table and bray it on the paper there.  It keeps things from getting wildly messy.  They're responsible for keeping their own area cleaned up, and they get points off for lots of smudges.


When they have inked their plate once, they cut away anything that they want to stay that color, or they cut out things they want to make another color--either way works.  Below is an example of how it works. 


I actually took this off of the internet, but it explains it all quite nicely.  I apologize to whomever it belongs--there was no citation.  If it's yours, please let me know!



Here are some of the works the 5th graders produced. 



The kids did a great job.  They worked so hard to get good, clean prints.  Afterward, we had a gallery walk--the students took their best print, their original drawing, and their mind map and put it neatly on the table top where they sat, and set up a space for their peers to come look at the process they used to make their prints.  They were all impressed with each others' work and we had some great conversation about the process, the difficulties, and the rewards of developing a plan for their artwork before executing it. 

The gallery walk