Last quarter I was lucky to have a wonderful student teacher. As part of her practice teaching she created a project unit for 3rd grade dealing with shapes and colors. One of the projects was a clay project inspired by artist Kimmy Cantrell. She came up with a great clay face project that combined shape and texture. We brainstormed different ways of finishing the pieces - using glazes or painting with acrylic. Because I'm in three different buildings there were 5 classes that were going to be doing this project. She would be doing the project with the 3rd graders in two of my schools and because of the timing I would be doing it with the 3rd grade class in my third school after her time with me was done. We decided to experiment with how to finish the clay faces to see which was the better method. She used glazes in one school and acrylic paint coated with wax in the other school. I decided to use acrylic paint with the class I did - but had students base coat with black first.
I think there were great successes in all of the classes. The students enjoyed the project. They learned about asymmetrical design, texture, and a new artist all while having fun!
Here are the results of the three different methods....which do you prefer?
These pieces were finished using glazes -
These pieces were finished using "earthy" colors of acrylic paint coated
with some floor wax for shine -
These pieces were finished with a base coat of black acrylic - when that dried students chose lots of different colors of acrylic to it. No wax coating seemed to be needed -