Sasha’s Favorite Project of 2022/23: Mixed Media Paintings!
What was my favorite project of the year? That’s an easy one. Kindergarten Mixed Media Paintings! Why? Because they represent, so completely, what art-making and art-teaching should be.
Students should be responding to the work in front of them when making artistic choices about their next steps (a skill that young artists are building) and teachers, simultaneously, should be responding to the actions of their students; deciding what they need to teach based on the ways in which their students engage with the current stage of a project. This multi-layered, multimedia project allowed for conscious decision making (for them and for me!) after each work session. I made choices solely based on how their paintings were coming along and what their work needed: a more controlled or loose medium, darker or lighter colors, contrast, a different texture. At the end of each work session, I’d respond to their pieces with the proposition of what to add next. After 10 work sessions, their finished paintings were complex and rich with overlapping layers of experimentation.
So, here, they are: some of their finished mixed-media paintings! And, more importantly, keep reading to learn the steps we took to get there.
The steps we took to create our Mixed Media Paintings:
Get students excited about their surface! We had stretched canvases of all different sizes and shapes. Artists began to think about how a very long painting may be different from one that’s square.
Cover the surface (1-2 work sessions) We began by mixing primary colors of acrylic paint. We only had 2 primary colors and white so we expanded on that limited palette to fill our negative space. If you do this on a second day, use 2 different primaries and white.
Add areas of emphasis (2-3 work sessions) We cut out and collaged images from magazines, making sure to cover our images with clear glue so they’d be stable and shiny when they were dry. We also worked hard to cut out organic silhouettes (not rectangles).
Tint the collaged images (1 work session) We added a layer of liquid watercolor on top of and around our cut out images. We experimented with layering translucent color on top of acrylic and magazine.
Add texture (1-2 work sessions) We added yarn onto our paintings. Yarn was used in different ways: as lines framing our images, as flat pieces hanging outside the limits of the canvas and even as small-scale sculptures.
Add bright colors (1-2 work sessions) We experimented with using watercolor crayons to add bursts of color within our work.
Add contrast (1 work session) We completed our paintings with brush and sumi ink to add lines or shapes on top of or around the various elements of our compositions.