Visit Seven: Magazine Collage Illustrations ~ Kara Leigh's Arts Bridge Experience

Visit Seven: Winter Collage Illustration Project (Continued)

Second Day of Illustration-ing! Today we paired the book This is Not My Hat with collage making. The students LOVED reading the book (and for good reason, it's very entertaining). This book is another example of a story that is told almost entirely through pictures.

I brought in a pile of magazines (National Geographic) and gave instructions that I thought would be adequate enough, but turned out to need a lot more clarification. I intended us to use the colors and textures from some of the pictures in the magazines to create pictures of our own, however, the children were much more focused on cutting out exactly the image they needed. When they didn't find a bunch of snowmen and Christmas-y things in the pages, they resorted to cutting out a cool wolf, or a funny monkey, or a refrigerator. We ended up with lots of very strange conglomerations of collages. We provided them with construction paper as well, which made a strange mixture of paper materials.

This was probably my least favorite activity. I was not prepared for the children's understanding of the assignment to be limited. I thought I could just adequately explain what was in my head, and have them perform. My BYU mentor happened to be here observing me this day, and she gave me a number of great pointers and feedback. First of all the project was too high of a level for the first graders. I think collaging in general is a difficult idea, and I didn't have a great example to show them, even though I did model it. Secondly, I should have just provided them with plain construction paper. The magazines were way too distracting. I could have used them for another type of collage where they were actually using the random pictures they found, but for this they were more difficult then helpful.

You can start to see the randomness that is collaging!

The kids were having SO much fun though. As far as fun art projects with no limitations- this one wins some sort of a prize!

This is me trying to explain the purpose of the collage- but honestly, the kids were coming up with really interesting representations of their thoughts, so I decided to just drop it and stop trying to force them to accomplish the art the way I had intended, and just let the creativity unleash.

Mrs. Ackley and I decided not to use this project as a part of our final book. We ended up with lots of really interesting conglomerations of random pictures. While these were very interesting as pieces of art, they didn't make very good illustrations for the books. Instead we used a separate chalk drawing that the children created later this week.