So, lovely art teacher friends...want a project that yields high success and will become a fan favorites with your kiddos? These pastel lava lamps might be just the ticket! So dust off your mirror ball and polish off your favorite disco tracks because you are going to love this groovy lesson!
So why lava lamps?
a) They are just plain cool! Invented by a British man and former English army engineer, Edward Craven Walker in the 60's, manufacturers are still selling half a million of them world wide each year.
b.)They give your art room a nice ambiance. Just look at that thing glow! The kids really responded to them and commented on how nice they looked in the art room. I bought one and some students brought in their own for the duration of the lesson. I even found a Bob Ross one on Amazon!
c.) They were easy enough subjects that every student could be succsessful drawing them! The organic forms produced inside made it easy for students to create practice using repetition and variety to balance their composition. Furthermore, and perhaps even more importantly, they learned to create the illusion of three dimensional forms using shading with pastels.
How was it taught?
Students begin by observing lava lamps in motion I found a video on YouTube of a close up of four different colored lava lamps flowing which lasted an hour. I put this on the Smart board so that students could observe drawing the way organic shapes stretch and then pull apart to form blobs that float to the top and then glide back down to the bottom.
We then moved to practicing with pastels on the black paper and discussed the elements form and value. I demonstrated how to create a gradient with the lightest color at the bottom fading to a darker color at the top of each shape. This helped the shapes to look as if they were lit up from the light source at the bottom of the lamp. I also demonstrated how to use a white to add hightlights and a black to deen the black around the shape and add just a touch of black onto the form to create a warped form in some cases.
Next, we used templates (I made three different shaped ones) that I pre-cut that were the length and shape of one side of the lava lamp so that students could trace and then flip it to trace the other side creating perfect symmetry. We traced them with the same color pastel that our lava had been done in and added highlights of white in aread down the length of the glass part of the sides only.
For the base of the lamp, I demonstrated how to shade the sides in a dark color that faded to a medium color, and then to a lighter color with white highlight in the very center of the base. I demonstrated how to blend in a curved, sweeping fashion so that the gradient would follow the cylindrical form.
Finally we used some of the color from the lava and smudged some of it into the background around the lamps on both sides to ressemble ambient lighting and viola! Perfectly beautiful results for every student! I did this project the first time with 60, beginning Art 1 students and there wasn't a bad example in the bunch!
For the full Going with the Flow presentation and other resources, check out my Art Queen Sandy TPT store!!
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