Students and staff at Columbine Elementary School worked together on
this project.
Everyone's creative abilities came into play, and everybody had a part
in making the decorative canes and other clay pieces
used in decorating the masks and in making the flower petal motifs.
To create those, students in Kindergarten, First and Second grades helped
roll out sheets of white clay into foot long sections. Then everyone carefully
placed hundreds of slices from the canes to fill in several entire sheets!
Ends of all the canes that are removed before slicing the decorative
pieces are combined to create a large and very colorful scrap pile.
Students got to play and experiment with this and also with
some Sculpeylll clay donated by Polyform
during some of their class times--and everyone decided they like using
polymer clay!
Then all the scraps were combined and rolled out into more sheets. The
decorated sheets were then placed on top of these, in order to make the
entire thing thicker, and to also make it colorful, as some will be visible
in the installation.
In order to press the decorative slices firmly into the clay, the entire
thing is then passed again through a pasta machine's rollers and the caned
images spread out and adhere firmly to the clay backing.
The sheets become longer as this happens--thats why the backing sheet
was added, so that this sheet would not become too thin as they are rolled.
Decorative rubber stamps donated by Uptown
Design Co. and Colorbox Inks donated by Clearsnap
are used to add even MORE color and pattern--and to fill in any spots left
available.
To catch the light and the eye even further, aqua, purple and gold micro-fine
glitters from The Art Institute Glitter
are applied to the sheets.
Then cookie cutters
are used just as they would be on dough--but these tools never cross over
into kitchen food use. These decorative motifs have the designs created
in all the original caning lessons and are all created in a pallete of
the school colors too!
The flowers are reminiscent of a patchwork quilt made
of many kinds and colors of textiles, joining to be something beautiful
all by themselves AND together.
After baking the flowers are combined with bamboo stakes for stems, molded
copper colored clay centers, and some felt "leaves" to create
our garden of flowers. Other polymer clay flower cut-out flowers without
stems and leaves will be used as a border around the atrium in the installation.
The students in Third, Fourth and Fifth grades each decorated
a mask and so did the staff members. 