Ladies:
Here’s some thoughts on the Chagall art project from our experiences at Berney:
One hour is enough time, but barely, to do a 15-20 minute presentation on Chagall’s life
and art and then 40 minutes on the art project. This does not include setting up and
cleaning up.
Help for this project part would be good. Having one person explaining the project while
the other sets up the paints and hands out the materials would be a big help. Another
way it was done at Berney was that while one Picture Lady spoke, the other was setting
up, and then they traded off speaking and setting up. We waited until the kids were
ready to start painting to pass out the paints so they wouldn’t dry out, but everything
else was distributed ahead of time – and there are usually lots of student helpers for
this.
You don’t need big blobs of paint on the yogurt lids, but be prepared to add more of
some colors for some tables. The starch bottle is to extend the paint and thin it a bit, we
put a squirt of it in the middle of the lid.
We started bringing baby wipes for the kids to wipe their brushes between colors. Thank
Marcella Reitz for this tip, it’s a great one.
The kids shared the paints (one set for 2 kids) and the brayers (same, one
brayer/2kids). This worked fine except a couple of kids just smooshed all their colors
together on the lids and ended up with mud brown. So we started to warn them against
this.
We quickly abandoned the direction to draw a shape on the Plexiglas to begin the
project; in our experience, all the flipping of the Plexiglas confused some kids, and
some got too stuck on what they wanted to draw – starting directly with the paint
seemed to get them going creatively right away. This project doesn’t produce highly
detailed images; it was fun to help the kids discover unexpected shapes in their work.
We found that if the paint was dry enough at the end (for the quick workers), they could
use a black marker or black pencil to outline shapes and add detail. Chagall used this
technique on some of his work, so it’s not inconsistent with the project, and it really
made some of the pieces much better. If the paint wasn’t dry, I would ask the teacher if
it was possible for them to have some time later to add the outlining.
Take a couple of towels to dry the Plexiglas with at the end, or get them from your
school janitor, and plan on 15 minutes of clean-up unless you have help. Putting the
Plexiglas in a sink of water to soak as the kids got done helps with the clean-up.
Mary Ann Duffy used a color wheel in her presentations to speak for a bit on color
theory, explaining primary and complementary colors, and she thought the kids got a lot
out of that.