Art Cards

The parents at Takoma Park Cooperative Nursery School printed sets of cards featuring the incredible artwork from last year's class! First, they sold these to the parents at the school and now they are available to purchase through the school's website. They really are stunning and the quality of the printing is delicious!

The proceeds will be put right back into art supplies, for sure!

-click here to check out the collection-

Up!

What to do with the color wheels? Cardboard + Paint + Glue + Stuff = Too Heavy for Any Kind of Tape! Time to put the eye hooks in the ceiling to good use. Using pony beads and wire through a hole in the center of each cardboard disk, I attached the wheels to the eye hooks, pulled up as tight as possible to the ceiling. After all, it is almost time for our open house tours and we wouldn't want anyone to knock their heads on all the loveliness the children glued to these color wheels!

Flattening Art Work for Mounting

Caring for children's work is a bit of an obsession with us. We build portfolios over the course of the year and send the collections home at the end of each school year. In the previous post, Labeling Children's Work, I shared a little bit about how we label children's work. There is often a lot of work that precedes mounting the pieces the children have been working on.

We use a variety of surfaces for paint and collage, but primarily we use some kind of paper. As paint or glue is applied to paper, it pulls and shrinks it. On some collage projects, like the Kuitca-inspired paintings the children worked on last year, paper must be glued onto the back to balance and pull them back onto a mountable surface.

On easel paintings or on simple painted paper, I use an iron. If I have time, or rather if I don't have time to sit and iron, I use hollow blocks to flatten works. Some items take A LOT of weight AND time. We have a collection of large boards in the basement that we use to flatten works like the glue-washed easel paintings and the latest BIG paintings. After a few days these works, which before flattening would have resisted all methods of adhering to our walls for display, are ready to emerge like butterflies.

A stack of glue-washed easel paintings ready to emerge.

The BIG paintings are on 60-inch lengths of recycled, heavy stock paper. With each 
layer of paint and brush stroke, the paper pulls and shrinks. I place the paper, painted 
side down so that curled portions don't become creases -- children can put creases in 
paper, but it should not happen during my care!

I had to use several sheets of 4'x8' plywood because the BIG painting are so BIG! They have to be flattened because the paper's weight will pull it down unless the tape is able to attach itself evenly.

Labeling Children's Work

One of the first things we teach our parent volunteers is that they should only write on the back of a child's work. The adult hand does not have a place on the surface the child will be working on. This includes drawings, paintings, and collage. Names, descriptions, dates, and titles are not recorded on the back of the work using a pencil or a marker (readability is important -- seeing it from the other side, not so much!

For formal display, we use a variety of approaches. From printable labels to card stock trimmed to size. More space may be needed if there is a story attached. Giving the work a title or attaching a story to it is part of our look twice approach. The work is then mounted on construction paper or other kinds of paper. The care taken to display work speaks volumes to the child artist. They know, that we know, an important conversation has begun between viewer and artist. We place value on their work and their voice is the one we are listening to.

Easel paintings are labeled on the back with the child's name while they are works-in-progress

Labels include a brief description of how the work was made as well as the date. The child's name has been lifted from this photograph. The title of the work is, "Summer"

We place the children's symbols in the lower right corner. 

Card stock is used for longer descriptions. In  this case, the children described their oil pastel maps of Wild Island.

Labeling on a drawing is usually done in pencil in order to make sure that the adult's writing does not show through the paper