Mommio: Art Class

After sharing our watercolor and gold leaf homework...

We started to study the famous Italian artist Giotto today.  He was another artist during the Gothic period in Italy (1267-1337) and was actually the apprentice to the artist we studied last week- Cimabue.  As a young child Giotto first discovered art while he was tending to his father's sheep. He began by scratching circles, and then pictures of sheep, into the flat surfaces of the rocks on the hills where they roamed.  Today the kids tried making their own scratch art pictures.  We learned about scratchboards that artists use now and we watched this cool time lapse video of  the making of a  scratchboard portrait.

We also looked at bits of this video taken at a Scratch Art expo done by tattoo artists from around the country.  It was very cool to see what people can do with scratch art!

After I covered the table with lots of newspaper- we got to work creating our own homemade scratchboard- first they colored a thick layer of white with an oil pastel onto a piece of chipboard.

Next they covered over the white with a double layer of black oil pastel, until they could not see through it.  At this point there was a lot of complaining about how tired their arms were!

Then I cut each child's homemade scratchboard in half so that they could try out two different methods.  For both they used the sharp end of a paperclip to scratch pictures into the top layer, revealing the lighter color underneath.  First, they scratched freehand patterns directly onto the scratchboard.

For the other one, they learned how to make a transfer pattern.  I gave them a sheet of regular paper cut to the same size as their scratchboard and had them draw a picture of their choosing with pencil.
Next we taped the picture to the scratched board and traced over the image again with the pencil.

Then we removed the pencil image and revealed our transfer image on the scratchboard.  Using the paper clip again, the kids scratched over the lines of the image and filled in more detail where they wanted it.
Here is what they came up with:

This was a fun project!  For homework the kids will experiment more with scratch art by using various colors as the base instead of one light color.  Next time we will learn more about Giotto as an adult, his masterpiece Lamentation of Christ, and how to make frescoes using plaster on chipboard.