Sometimes Keeping Things Pays Off

Four years ago, I made gelatin plates with my sixth graders.  And it was a disaster. Of pretty epic proportions.  So, of course I swore I'd never do it again.  But being the hoarder being the art teacher that I am, I shoved them in a box.  Today my sixth graders needed to Gelli print over some contour line drawings, and I only have five real Gelli plates, so I pulled them out of the box I'd shoved under a table, and you know what?  Those homemade (school made???) ones still work!  They were still in one piece, and there was really minimal shrinkage.
Of course, they needed to be melted down, and I made a tiny disaster of that, but still!

Old gelatin plate that I pulled apart with my hands for microwave melting.

Pulled apart pieces in a little plastic container that once held some kind of cards.

After melting.  Notice the spilled drip.

Can't wait to get these (newly melted and then set back up) out with my students next week!

Happy Winter Break! Now, Let's Talk Shop . . .

Paint shirts! Who uses them? I do, but I know many art teachers who avoid them all together. At my old school we used old lady polyester shirts that were hilarious and totally awesome, but now, at my current school we use former man business button downs that have seen better days.  They get GROSS.  Like, sweaty-kids-after-recess gross, sneezed-on-coughed-on gross, rubbed-all-over-the-table-and-floor gross.  Thus, they come home with me for some real washing periodically.  Christmas break is a definite time for paint shirt washing. Several years ago I also made the switch from sponges to clean tables (ewwww) to cheapie wash cloths to clean tables (much less ewwwww), and they make it home for washing as well (as they seem to always be full of paint).

After years of washing cloth diapers (five or so) I learned that the rinse and spin cycle is truly a friend of mine.  The rags and shirts seem much cleaner using a rinse and spin cycle or two prior to washing.  Isn't this a fun and informative post?!  That's why I get the big bucks (totally kidding).

Speaking of big bucks, I made a Gelli-printed sketchbook to house all my documents and information for my new position as elementary division rep:

Cover

I literally used leftover demonstration pages from my sixth grade Gelli print unit from last year:

Inside cover with a pouch for writing/drawing instruments

I had to add an extra strip of Velcro for when I need to tighten it down.

I used some more scraps to make folders on pages that double as tabs:

That's a built-in bookmark and an article copied from School Arts that we were
discussing in our collab group one day.

Hard to see in the photo, but the folders DO function as tabs.

It was a fun project, and I hope it comes in handy.  Enjoy your break, friends--rest, relax and re-energize for the next semester!

Let's Call It a Comeback

Ah, Payons! If you've taught a while, you remember these gems.  Always hard.  Stuck in the black cardboard tubes, then suddenly (without warning) slipping out and you'd find them later in a water cup.  They stained EVERYTHING.  Most art teachers I know got rid of them.  But I am not a person who gets rid of everything (see any previous posts where I speak of my hoarding ways).  So, I have a box full of them in my painting cabinet (they were here when I came 9 years ago).

This morning we were in our collaboration group and another art teacher was sharing how she's using water soluble oil pastels with styrofoam.  She has them "carve" their styrofoam with a dull pencil, then color the styrofoam with water soluble oil pastels, lightly spritz their papers with water and print.  It works wonderfully, there's more blending and color gradation and they can print several times before they recolor.  Only I don't have any water soluble oil pastels.  I have Payons.  So I tried it, and it worked:

I just used scrap styrofoam that I had.
It's just a design, not a word
(although it looks a bit like one here)

While we were all working someone asked "I wonder if these oil pastels would work on Gelli Plates?"  We tried, and it didn't work at all.  But Payons did! They create a beautiful watercolor effect when you dip the Payons in water, draw directly on the Gelli Plate and pull the print:

In case you don't know this about me, I LOVE my Gelli Plates.  I make Gelli art all the time at home (so I'm totally taking a box or two of old Payons home with me tonight!)

Unlike LL Cool J, I'm totally calling this a comeback for Payons! (And their performance may just knock you out!)

See how the yellow Payon stained the Gelli Plate?
It's not a big deal.

You Know You're an Art Teacher When

 You know you're an art teacher when you take a selfie with a huge papier mache sarcophagus and send it to friends.  Seriously, this thing is BIG:

And it "lives" in the basement art room of my second school.  The art teacher who put it there bought it at a garage sale.  I really want someone to hide in it and jump out.  Not to scare me, of course, but scaring someone else would be hilarious!
You also know you're an art teacher when things go horribly, disasterly wrong, and you keep on truckin' right through that lesson even though you want to cry.  Laughing at this point is recommended.
Remember this video? And my plan to have students make their own gelli plates?  Well, we did it:

Aren't you so impressed?  Yeah, me either.  But I'd already poured a million dollars into this (ok, so really only about $175, and PTA paid for it + my generous principal reimbursed me for my out of pocket expense, but STILL) so I was bound and determined to make it work.
We started with the lids from tempera cakes:

And used the 7 packets-gelatin-11/2 cups-glycerin-1 1/2 cups-boiling-water recipe and got this:

But for some reason they didn't set up well like when I did them at home:

And did I check them before whipping them out of the cafeteria refrigerator to have a class of 28 use them??? Of course not! Ain't nobody got time for that! So we ended up with a GIANT mess of gelatin, glycerin, acrylic paint and brayers:

AND my classes are back-to-back, so I had fourth grade and third grade after this disaster.

But NO WAY was I going to let anything like a lesson/experiment going horribly awry stop me!  So I scooped what I could of the faux gelli plates back into the tempera cake lids and microwaved them for 2 minutes (one lid melted a bit, and then I knew to more closely monitor the microwaves) and got this:

See how all the paint mixed in?  So what?  They still work!

There's six like this.  All different colors.  They kind of look like
some sort of coral reef/ocean thing.

Then I decided to actually learn from my mistakes and try it out before having the students do it, and this is what I got:

Totally happy with it.  And if students produce quality work it's all worth it, right art teachers????