Tuesday, June 28, 2022

Williams Middle School - Practicum Teaching: Paper Mache sculpture

A lesson that has become really popular with the 8th grade classes at Williams is the annual animal/character sculpture project.  This was a lesson created by my supervising practitioner Ed O’Gilvie and later taught by myself during the practicum.  The purpose of said lesson is to teach students how to build out and create organic forms (animals, cartoon characters, etc.) by using geometric forms (sphere, cone, etc.) as a foundation.  A secondary objective is to encourage students to begin thinking about how everyday materials (cardboard, newspaper) can be recycled and utilized to create art, like sculptures. 
   
Interestingly this particular project did not start with a brainstorming drawing.  Instead, students began by preparing their sculpting materials (cutting out many 1” wide thin cardboard strips from cereal boxes, Ritz cracker boxes, frozen food boxes, etc.).  Students then used their fingers or the edge of the worktables to curve these cardboard strips.  In order to create the initial structure students had to take three of these strips and tape them together (using masking tape), end-to-end, thereby creating a ring.  Holding the ring horizontally students then built off of this to create a second ring that runs vertically around the other.
 

Students continued to add cardboard rings and masking tape to their sculpture until there were no more gaps in the newly created form (a sphere, ellipsoid or ovoid). 
 



Additional forms like crumpled balls of newspaper and paper towel tubes were added to the sculptures in order to create appendages like heads, arms, fingers, tails and objects like goggles, shells etc.
 













When they were ready to move onto the next step students would then apply two layers of paper mache newspaper to their sculpture, let the surface dry and finally apply one layer of paper mache paper towel (this final layer is intended to cover up the text and images of the newspaper underneath as well as create a better painting surface).
 



 




Lastly students used acrylic paint and decorative elements like beads to give life and color to their sculpture.
 


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