Vinyl Remixed - 7th grade

"Records? Vinyl? What's that Mrs. Clarke?

I officially feel old...

I scoured thrift shops to find old vinyl records for my students to paint on. I found 70 of them for .10 each and felt like I struck gold.

When I showed the students this project, I wanted them to have to problem solve, utilize one of those inherent skills they learn in art without even knowing they have learned it.

Assignment:

Create a painting on a vinyl record.
Use your problem solving skills to figure out how to make dark colors stand out on a black plastic record. (We used acrylic paint, as tempera would just flake off when it dries. We did not prime the vinyls in any way, just sketched with pencil and dove right in with paint!)
Subject: Free choice!

Students were able to choose any subject they wanted, realistic, or abstract/nonobjective, or anything in between.

I am very happy with the results:

This one was created by one of my Learning Support Students 

Name Design Project 2018

I was perusing Pinterest when I came across a pin that looked like it would be great for 6th grade . 
The link took me to a blog post with great visuals that really helped my students to be able to see what step to take next as I demonstrated up front. 

She calls them kaleidoscope names, which is a great name for these awesome works of art:

http://chincolle.blogspot.com/2012/05/kaleidoscope-names-radial-symmetry.html

Students began by folding a 12x12 piece of drawing paper to create 8 same sized triangles.  They then drew the letters of their name using bubble letters into one of the triangles, stretching their letters top to bottom. 

After their drew their name, they used the transfer process to recreate their name again and again. 

One thing I told them to do was to not add the top and bottom of the letters, so that it would look like they were connecting on the fold lines to form shapes. 

They used sharpie marker to trace all their pencil lines and then chose marker or colored pencil to add color to their designs, keeping their coloring symmetrical. 

They turned out so good! Several teachers told me they loved them and had no idea that they were the students names.