Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Life's turns

I saw a wonderful art project on Pinterest that spoke to me. Wall art using magazines. Here is the original pin that inspired today's art project.
Seemed simple enough, so I thought I'd give it a go.
I started with tracing the circles and then cutting them out. That's a lot of circles...I need help. Thank heavens I teach high school and most of those kids are pretty good at cutting on the line. What started out as me tracing and cutting a bunch of solid colored circles out of magazines, quickly turned in to a bunch of teenagers tracing circles anywhere on a page where the template fit and then cutting that out. I wanted only solid colors, but what I got changed the art project. They saw texture and thought it was beautiful and I had to agree.
After an epic failure of a day today, involving children fighting over who sat where in the car, a diaper blowout with no change of clothes in the diaper bag and the water getting turned off due to the bill being one day late, I resorted to my happy place of crafting.
We started with painting a simple white canvas the same grey that I used on the bedroom walls. Two coats to thoroughly saturate the canvas with the beautiful grey.


Regular latex wall paint in a flat finish
 Next, Brooklyn and I stared at the original inspiration for a few minutes and I explained the project to her. Her interpretation was slightly different than mine. She wanted to just spread the dots out with no rhyme or reason to where they went. I was seeing them a little bit more ordered. But, after she placed a few dots on the canvas and asked, "Mom, isn't this just lovely?" we went with her way!

My original layout

My layout on the left and Brooklyn's on the right.
After they were placed, we had to take them all up to put a layer of Mod Podge down. Replace all those dots, and then Mod Podge two layers on top.

Love the canvas being the same color as the walls.

Another angle

LOVE IT!
My favorite part of this project was the transformation that it took from start to finish. Initially, the project was mine. Once I started asking for help with it, all the hands that were involved started to change the shape of the project. Each circle was cut out by one of my students. They selected where to place their template to trace thus adding their own individuality to "my" art project. Then the placement of the dots was transformed by Brooklyn's innocent placement of what she thought was beautiful. Though the end product is not what I envisioned at all, it is so much more and I wouldn't change a thing.

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