Dotty Wotty Fiber Art

This quarter I am thinking all about TEXTURE with my Art Club. After going thru a few old copies of my Arts and Activities magazines my plans were set. For our first project we created these great Dotty Wotty houses made by stitching.

I first introduced my students to artist Tyree Guyton a popular local hero in Detroit. He has taken two blocks in Detroit's inner city and turned it into a true work of art titled The Heidelberg Porject, check out the website for more information, www.heidelberg.org. The basic idea is this, he has taken trash and turned it to treasure by creating art installations, each with deep meaning beyond the visual. He has gotten children and his community thinking and creating art, all of this has helped to heal in times of tribulation. The "Dotty Wotty House" is covered with multicolored dots, which represent the colors of people all over the world. I hooked my computer up to a project and took the club on a "tour" of the neighborhood using Google Maps, they loved this and said it was like a game video :) 

Then we talked about fiber art. I showed students a simple running stitch, and I was happy that most students picked this up rather quickly. After the houses were made we then added felt, buttons and other odds and ends to finish the colorful "Dotty Wotty" effect. 

Cacti and other Desert Plants

3rd Graders made these wonderful desert plants out of clay! The lesson pervious to this we created a desert landscape with overlapping hills (Thanks to Lines, Dots and Doodle for the idea). Here is a picture of the landscape painting.

Doing the landscape before the clay lesson made for some great connections and students were more familiar with how desert plants look. I encouraged students to add patterns and rhythms to the pots of their plants to give their artwork more embellishment and details. 

These obviously have not been painted yet, but they have great FORM! 

I love the yellow coils creeping from the pot of the front right piece! 

Ndebele Houses

It was so much fun creating this 3D works of art with 1st Grade! After talking about and showing them some pictures of the Ndebele people of Africa and their beautifully colorful, patterned houses, we started to create out own. First we started with black paint to create patterns with lines or shapes. Then in our next meeting we added color with crayons or markers, still keeping patterns in mind. After all that we took those 2D flat piece of paper and transformed it into a 3D artwork! This is a great lesson to do with the students so they can learn about Form, especially  if you don't have clay and a kiln at your school. Check them out!