Mini Monets

Greetings Parents,

For this sculpture, I introduced the idea to the artists that you do not have to use clay or wire to create a sculpture. We used only paper to create a 3 dimensional ocean scene with an origami whale. I began the class by reading the book W is for Waves An Ocean Alphabet by Marie and Roland Smith. It’s a long book so I focused on the oceanic concepts on the pages B is for Beaches, T is for Tides and Tsunamis, and W is for Waves. After passing out large blue sheets of paper, we began our scenes by creating wind blown and wave washed sand. We crumpled up our tan/yellow paper and then glued it to the bottom of the paper. The uneven crumbled lines show how sand easily changes during high and low tides. Next, I handed out different shades and tints of blues and teals to create our ocean waves. I explained how we would glue low and high waves to create these low and high relief paper sculptures. The definition of a relief sculpture is the projection of a figure or part from the ground plane on which it is formed. The smaller, low waves would show low relief while taller, high waves would show high relief. I demonstrated a few ways to create low waves or high waves, yet encouraged them to explore more ways of manipulating the paper strips to create their ocean waves.

To finish off our ocean relief sculptures, we added Origami whales. Origami is the traditional Japanese art or technique of folding paper into a variety of representational forms. We used a fairly simple version of a whale that I felt confident that your artists could complete and most did with very little help! Once we created one or two whales to glue into our oceans, we used markers to decorate them.

After this project, the artists will have a choice of what they want to create. We are taking inspiration from Calder who created his mobiles because he “liked to” and they are having an open studio to create what they like. If they are in need of inspiration, I am reading the book Boogie Monster by Josie Bissett and we are sculpting small, dancing monsters with Model Magic and pipe cleaners.