Keys to the City, Diebenkorn Cityscape Studies

"Draw this..."

A cityscape

"Don't worry about coloring it in, you will paint it later."

After the cityscapes were all drafted, we looked at Diebenkorn's Cityscape I, 1963 and talked about the colors used -- the children named the colors they saw. I talked about how I thought it looked more like farmland or perhaps a city with a great park in the middle of it, like Central Park in New York City.

Cityscape I, 1963

Then...the paint is applied to the sketches.

A sampling of the completed paintings...

Land of Grass

Rainbow Farm

Traffic Line

A Frightening Forest

A House

Clown's Village

Sense of Place, Completed Works

The long-term building process of the children's art projects is interesting, but once completed, the titles the children give their works is the icing on the cake!

Home Airport

Ocean Airport 

 Benches

Anger of Solaria

Chinese Comedy Home

Icy 

Canada 

Bridge People 

Travel Map 

Princess Way 

Shadow Site Map

Shadow Sites 

Pit of Despair 

Dark Forest 

Park 

Water Waves

Fourth and Final Layers, Shadow Sites

The fourth and final layers of this year's Sense of Place projects bring the Shadow Site studies to completion. The fourth layer involved a glue wash. The glue wash is a dilute glue solution brushed on with a foam brush. This glue wash does a double duty here -- it holds the square pieces of wallpaper samples and holds the layers of melted crayons, the shaving cream/paint, and the tempera. The wallpaper samples provide more "shadows" in the landscape. The children chose pieces that would represent tree and building shadows.

The final layer brought color to the deep shadows. These colors were necessary because we do not live in a desert landscape. The children tell me that these colors -- paint samples -- are buildings and in some cases, airplanes floating over the shadowscapes. 

The floating effect was created by gluing the paint samples to styrofoam peanuts and then attaching these strategically over the background.

Gluing the styrofoam peanuts to the backs of paint samples and then gluing these to the back ground.

The display goes up...

Third Layer, Shadow Sites

The melted crayon and the homemade puffy paint gave the paintings both layers and texture and the shadows needed for the imagined aerial views. The third layer of tempera paint in white, brown, and black should give the paintings the highlights of the landscape. After this, we will take our departure from the desert landscapes of Jananne Al-Ani to shape landscapes that the children imagine. I think paint chip samples will be in our future.

These details of the some of paintings show little moments of wax resist. Each painting is different, but one thing was consistent. The children are enjoying it and most of the black painting finally came off our hands.

2nd Layer, Shadow Sites

Serendipity is the name of this game. Last week during a parent-teacher conference, a parent brought in a painting her son wanted to show me. There was a kind of puffy paint on it and I asked the mother what it was and she told me it was a mixture of white glue, shaving cream, and food color. What? Jump in with two feet, don't even look where you will land. Monday rolled around and I mixed up a batch right away. Not knowing the ratio of glue to shaving cream wouldn't be the thing to stop anyone would it? Since we are working on shadows for our Al-Ani Shadow Site studies, I used black tempera instead of food color.

I bought a batch of palette knives earlier in the summer, so the children were all set to for spreading this thick substance. They used forks and potato mashers for the lines and ridges. So cool!

The first layer of this work is discussed here, Encaustic Preschool Style. These are not done! There will be more. If you visit the Shadow Sites at the Sackler, I think you will see where we are headed next.