Chihuly Danglers

I don't know many art teachers who don't know about Dale Chihuly and use his work in some way. With that said, I do this quick project with my 4th after the lengthiness of the one-point perspective This little project is about two to three classes.

So to start I show them a Dale Chihuly video on youtube and ask them to describe what they saw in his artwork. I try to get them to focus on color and light. From there we go into warm and cool colors and how these colors work good together. Along with shape of his work and flow of it. Next we start the project. I have them get at least five pieces of transparent paper and a pre-traced spiral and have them trace the spiral onto the transparent paper. Next I give them a choice between warm OR cool. And simply tell them to color it in. Now some students go about this order however they wish. Either tracing all and coloring or tracing and coloring one at a time. 

Once all colored, they cut them out along the spiral and hole punch the middle. Then taking a pipe cleaner, they use beads and construct the dangler. I tell them to put a bead at the bottom and twist the pipe cleaner around it and then layer the beads and spirals. I say bead x2 then spiral works good but no more then five beads between spirals. 

 A NEAT trick a student last year figured out was if you trace on one side and flip it over. You do not have to worry about smearing the colors. Pretty ingenious if I must say. 

Once done, I hang them up in the hall like so for about a week. I do like this project a lot for it is a nice little break and has problem solving and design challenges (what if the hole punch breaks the transparent paper). For next year I plan to re film my demo videos to include some tips and tricks such as the flipping it around.