Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Myth and Fairy Tale Repousses


For this project, third grade looked at a variety of myth and fairy tale character imagery and chose their favorite to create a sketch of.    Students were instructed to include as much line detail as possible, as it was going to be important for the next step (carving into the foil).  To help build our line vocabulary, we examined some of Van Gogh's drawings below and tried to describe the different marks or lines we could see.  For homework students had to complete a line chart utilizing at least 8 different types of marks/lines and incorporate it into a drawing.  

Vincent van Gogh, Street in Saintes-Maries-de-la-mer, 1888

Vincent van Gogh, Wheat Field, 1888

Next, we switched to a very different and current artist Kiki Smith.  After examining some of her work, students recognized the common theme in her work was fairy tales.  Kiki Smith's artwork is often times influenced by how women were depicted throughout history in biblical text, cultural mythology, and fairy tales.  For example, in fairy tales there is usually a damsel in distress waiting to be saved by a charming prince.  

Artist Kiki Smith hard at work.
Kiki Smith, Born, Lithograph, 2003

Kiki Smith, Wolf Girl, Etching, 1999

The last step was examining some ancient repousses, which we learned in french means pushed up, due to its appearance.  Students used their fairy tale or myth creature drawings to trace onto a piece of tooling foil and with a dull pencil, created concave and convex areas by pressing into their designs on top of a magazine.  To give the illusion that their masterpieces were from from hundreds of years ago, we added some India ink into the groves of our design.  


Example of a Repousse on an ancient sword.  

The Great Dish or Plate of Bacchus, from the Roman Mildenhall Treasure.


Student Artwork


















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