Stencil with painted background

This is a cool stencil project that offers endless creative possibilities for high school students.

I'm super paranoid about using x-acto knives with students so I generally only use them with my high school students (Grade 10-12). Of course, if I have a particularly mature lower grade, they will use them as well. 

The first step is to create a stencil out of cardstock. This can be white or colored cardstock, but it needs to be a heavy paper. I left the subject open for my students. You can see below this student chose two Game of Thrones sigils- the House Stark direwolf proved far too challenging so he switched mid-way to House Greyjoy sigil. 

Once the stencil is cut out, he students design a background for it. This could be painted background or anything really. The students below chose to collage magazine pages to the back of her landscape stencil. 

Below you can see this student used a marker-watercolor technique 

for her background.

 

Some Grade 10-12 artworks below:

Cave Art Paintings

Here is one of my favourite lessons: Cave Art. These were created by 6th grade students. 

 We looked at the famous Caves of Lascaux, in France and watched a Youtube video about them.

 These paintings are estimated to be 17,300 years old. They consist mostly of primitive images of large animals, most of which are known from fossil evidence to have lived 

in the area at the time. The images include bison, bulls, horses, mammoths, etc. 

The caves were discovered by chance in 1941 by French teenager Marcel Ravidat, and his three friends. They found a hole in the ground while exploring a forest and Marcel  climbed down into it- this tunnel led to the caves. The boys initially kept the caves a secret, but soon told their teacher about it, as they knew him to be interested in archaeology and prehistoric art. From then on, the caves became famous around the world.

The original caves are now closed to the public (due to deterioration of the paintings cause by too many visitors), but the French authorities have recreated the caves nearby which are supposedly very realistic. You can visit an excellent online version here:

http://www.lascaux.culture.fr/?lng=en#/fr/00.xml   

(You get to take a virtual tour through the caves and listen to soothing music too! lol)

I hung up large cave art posters for the kids to refer to. They are called "Lascaux Cave Art Prints" which were ordered from the company Crystal Productions. It also comes with a DVD. What I find so fascinating about these caves is that you can see extinct animals such as the mammoth and animals not typical for the area today (hyenas, lions, panthers, woolly rhinoceroses, in France!)

Lascaux may be one of the more famous sites for cave art in the world, but of course, there are many others including the '"Cave of Swimmers" in the Sahara Desert and the Chauvet Cave in southern France. A documentary called "Cave of Forgotten Dreams", by Werner Herzog, was recently made about these caves. There's also the Cave of Altamira in Spain.

Here's an interesting video of the rock art found in the 'Cave of Swimmers' (made famous in the movie "The English Patient".) These painted caves in Egypt were 'discovered' (the local Bedouins already knew about them) by the Hungarian explorer László Almásy in October 1933. They are unusual in that they depict many human figures swimming, which shows that the Sahara Desert once had lakes and water.

To recreate cave walls, we used brown butcher paper and scrunched it up a bunch of times to make it nice and textural. We also added transparent washes of brown-ish tempera paint to give it even more depth. Then, using chalk pastels, we added more texture lines (cracks, irregularities on the cave walls) using dark brown and black chalk.  Blend, blend, blend.

Then students made a stylized stencil of an animal(s) out of cardstock. They freehand drew these and looked at the posters for inspiration. Then stencil (use a pouncing up-and-down motion with a round brush) these onto the background paper using natural colored tempera paint. Paleolithic artists have five main colors at their disposal: yellow, red, brown, black and white. White is more rare, but it is seen at Lascaux cave. The colours used were produced from ochre (reds and yellows), manganese dioxide (violet and black) and charcoal (black). These minerals were pulverized on stone palettes and mixed with animal fat to moisten them before they were applied with the fingers, bone spatulae or brushes. (source)

Here's an example of an animal stencil- just use scrap card or old file folders.

(My kids use paper palettes as they don't require cleaning afterwards!)

Nice variety of colours and use of overlapping....

Great sense of motion in this one!

Stencil Portraits

This is a really popular project with high school students because the get to a) use spray paint and b) use x-acto blades! We looked at the work of one of my favourite artists, the British street artist Banksy. His work involves alot of political and social commentary and is also very humourous (dark humour). 

Banksy, "Riot Flowers"

For this project, I had students choose a portrait to make into a hand-cut stencil. They could take an original digital photo themselves or use a picture of a famous person from the internet. 

Here is a step-by-step sample I did to show everyone the process:

 Upload any photo to an online photo editing program (Fotoflexer, Pixlr, etc.) If you know how to use Photoshop, of course that works as well. 

Turn your photo first into black and white (grayscale). Then fool around and adjust the contrast until you have a super high contrast image. 

Some photo editors might have a special feature for this (ie: 'ink stamp')

Below, I used Fotoflexer: I uploaded the photo, turned it to black and white, and then applied the 'ink stamp' feature. Easy peasy!

 

    

 

So here in the photo below I just fooled around with the contrast until I was pretty happy with the look of it. Print it out full size. If your photocopier or printer takes cardstock, print it out on that so you have a nice sturdy sheet of paper. If not, just trace the image onto cardstock.

So here it is below all traced out. I like to shade in the areas that need to be black and then cut those out using an x-acto knife and a cutting mat underneath.

These blades are super sharp- I always tell a really scary 'cutting accident' story before I let any students use these knives and then do a demonstration on how to use them properly. You know your class best and I would only do this project with a class that I trusted completely with using x-actos.

Here's a good thread on safely using x-acto blades with kids- some great tips there.

                  

x-acto knife



Cutting mats



So here above is the stencil all cut out from a sheet of cardstock (it's black because I had used it already).  Because it's thick paper, it takes time and patience to cut it all out. But you can use it over and over again- it's quite sturdy. 

Now it's time to spray-paint. Do this outside, away from buildings, and in a large box to contain the over-spray. Tape your stencil down onto your good copy paper- use any colour you want.

I just buy cheap matte black spray paint at the hardware store.

Shake it really well beforehand.  

Spray a nice even coat- I spray down at the artwork lying flat so you don't get any massive drips.

You might try using a low-tack spray glue so you get all the little pieces of paper glued down; otherwise they flip up a bit and spray paint goes underneath as it did here in the hair and it's just not as clean and sharp.

So here's my finished piece. You can look at the design and then choose to mask out some areas of your stencil you don't like with masking tape, or cut more areas.

Here are some student samples- they love making these and many end up doing their own at home

with different colours.



c'mon baby light my fire...

Other hand-cut stencil examples from students in Grades 11-12:

Junk Mail Art

I got this great little recycling art project from A Little Hut blog: http://alittlehut.blogspot.com/2007/05/recycling.html

She has all sorts of great recycling craft projects and many paper craft projects.

Because this project uses x-acto knives, it did it with a Grade 9/10 class that I completely trusted.  I always get nervous using x-acto's with students, but I always give a safety tutorial first and so far- knock on wood- I've had no injuries/cuts.

Here's how we did this project:

Cut your junk mail/flyers into a variety of thin strips. We just cut them with scissors.

  Look for flyers that have interesting colours. Use a glue stick to glue them on a piece of cardstock. 

This is just regular 8 x 11 size.

On cardstock, draw a simple stencil.  You need to include a thin border- at least 3cm or so.

Cut it out with an x-acto knife.

And then simply glue it on top of the junk mail strips!

Here are some of the work by my former Grade 9/10 class: