Modern Art-lesson #8

For Charlie and Shannon’s lesson, it was for fourth grade and titled Modern Art. We started off by rolling clay into a flat slab using a rolling pin. We could then cut any face shape out of that clay that we wanted to. We used a clay tool or a pencil to make four separate sections in our clay face. After we sectioned the face off into four parts, we had to make different textures in each of those parts. After that, we then used our extra clay from cutting out the face shape to make any eyes, nose, and mouth that we wanted to for our face.

After creating the eyes, nose, and mouth, we had to keep each of those things on the face. To do this, we used a technique called scoring and slipping. Scoring is making different texture marks on the face and back of the eyes, nose, and mouth. Slipping is taking a little bit of water on your finger and placing that on both scored areas, so the two pieces of clay stick together. We put the eyes, nose, and mouth on by those two techniques. After that, we painted the entire face with black paint. When the paint and clay dried (after a few days), we could paint our faces using whatever colors we wanted. For my face, I used red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple!

An extension activity would be for students to create a story in Language Arts class about their mask; almost like it is a real face/alive! This would be cool because everyone’s faces are different and the students could be really creative with it!