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

Egg Shell Maps

Sometimes things fall into place and other times, not so much. Painting on recycled maps is an early-in-the-year project for our prekindergarten class. The end result is lovely, but it is an exercise to train the eye. The maps offer line and shape, names of places, symbols and subtle colors to indicate place. We usually begin with oil pastels to trace line or to block out shapes and then apply watercolor to add color and more line. 

This class approached this idea with a "not so much" and a "not today" so I tried something different to draw the eye back to line and shape. I asked for egg shells (and we got them!) and the children glued these crunched shells onto maps, smooshing them and layering them. Later when the glue dried, the children painted the layered shells with watercolor. We arrived in the same place, shape and line, with an added bonus: texture!

The Light is On, Welcome Home

The glue wash seals the tempera paint, adheres the collage pieces,
and creates a semi-gloss finish to the background.

First Connection. A glue wash connects the smaller pieces of maps to the background map for a two layer effect.

For collage, we use foam brushes and a dilute glue solution (for this it was 2 parts water to 1 part glue -- NOT the consistency of milk.)

My favorite part is watching the children place the smaller maps on the large. Would they turn them a certain way or would they simply land them hoping to avoid gluey fingers?

Either way, they are looking at the materials in a very specific way.

Second Connection. Naming the finished work. The teacher asks, "Is the child making a connection to travel, mapping, place in the title?" Is there poetry in the title? The answer is YES. So yes, to art, and then yes to experiential learning and comprehension. And mostly, yes to the open imagination of the young artist.

Here are some of the titles, The Flash Map Drawing, Flower Garden Map, 2 Airplanes/5 Highways, A River and a Road.

Collected works

Detail, Star Chief and A River and a Road

Map detail, Mount Rushmore

Point of Destination

Painting maps on maps.

We chose a muted color palette for the larger background map that will offset the brighter hues of the watercolor painted on the smaller sections of map.

Have you ever checked out a palette generator? Check this out DeGraeve.com or another site I visit often is ColorMatters.com.

About the map backgrounds. Some children imagined new landscapes irregardless or perhaps inspired by the original map below. Others carefully followed the original map lines and shapes to create something brand new. At some point, the joy of paint on brush takes over. See, that is the coolest thing about working with young children -- You just never know! Their minds are wide open to possibilities.

Next point of destination is the glue wash and collage.

A Journey Begins

Last year, my prekindergarten class went to the Hirshhorn to see the Kuitca exhibit. On a scouting mission before we went, I found the book Katharine Harmon's The Map as Art. The exhibit proved very inspirational for the children, but the book is a treasure beyond compare.

In dramatic play the map shows dangers to avoid.

I have been trying to figure out the Sense of Place unit for years. Inspired initially by a painting by outsider artist, Roy Ferdinand called Popeye and His Skateboard, each year our projects take on different shapes, lines, and inspiration, but I feel like finding The Map as Art will change things for us.

Or maybe that spinning carousel of children's ideas is the thing that changes and we are simply able to find different gold rings to catch hold of as we spin 'round.

This afternoon class starts with dramatic play sessions each year. Our usual sessions plus an extra while we wait for the music and movement teachers' contracts to begin. The children built a boat the first day and pulled out the maps right away. So instead of exploring paintings of their bedrooms or some other idea like I usually do, we went straight for painting maps on maps, but this time we used different kinds of paint as well as map sections and created visual layers. This is the journey of a map on map painting.

Details of watercolor map sections.

To begin, I brought out a large map during our circle meeting and we worked on pulling out details from it. Airports, roads large and small, rivers and lakes, all were traced with fingers. We talked about the symbols and about the colors used. I showed them the small sections of map I had cut out of the larger ones (a former member of the school donated a case of Washington Metropolitan maps). Then later when we were in project center, we passed out the maps I had cut and the kids got right down to painting. They embraced painting 3 sections and some painted four, but no one painted the million they promised to paint during circle time!