Collage Idea Board and Long Overdue Thank you

A fall project in our studio has been to create more visual teaching and inspiration materials for our artists. In a choice-based environment, students are often working in a variety of media and with a variety of subjects. Teachers as well as peers are a great resource for technical assistance and problem solving. There is also much more opportunity for students to work independently and having lots of resources available helps with this.

One idea inspired by Teaching for Artistic Behavior is the creation of menus for use in different centers in the studio classroom. Menus provide a visual reference of the materials, techniques and vocabulary young artists will use in working with a given media.

Here is an example of an idea board for collage added to the studio this fall.

Now for the (long overdue!) thank you.

This idea board was created by a group of students from Princeton University last spring as part of a spring break trip sponsored by the Pace Center for Civic Engagement. The group's focus was to gain hands-on experience with the benefits of art-making for various populations. The Pace center is the main community service organization at Princeton and sponsors service activities, internships and Breakout Princeton trips such as this one.

Photos below show some of the process of creating the collages to show a variety of uses of media and methods.

Collage work is materials-rich and can often look like quite messy when in-progress.

Here unique edged scissors and a hole punch are combined with color and texture from a recycled painting. Rolls of colorful tape form another collage in the background.

This artist cut small shapes from different colored text pages and used these to build an image.

Many thanks to the group for sharing their time and creativity with us. One participant shared, "I learned a lot on our trip, and I have so much respect for those professionals who have dedicated their lives to imparting their love of art to others."

Many thanks to Jessica Marot for her help with background information about the PACE center.