Workshop 3: Overpainting

I think our third week of classes was a success. Once again, the community time went smoothly. I feel like everyone is much more relaxed now and it no longer feels like an awkward “get to know you” chore that we have to get out of the way.

This was my second week to teach. The girls had voted on overpainting and the fiber self-portrait out of my remaining lessons. Since I need selfies of the girls pre-printed for the fiber portraits, I went with overpainting for this week.

To prepare I went to thrift stores around town to search for amateur or kitsch paintings for the students to work on. However, even the thrift store paintings are out of my price range (at between $9-$20 a pop, I’m wondering if the frames are the part that’s valuable). Luckily, Dr. Baldus has a flat file full of poster prints in her supply.

 I chose a dark and gloomy Norman Rockwell poster with a crease down the middle for my example and demo piece. I figured if I could manage to do something with this print, it should be easy to show the girls how to work with posters that were better suited for the project. To be sure I understood what the students would be doing, I had gone through the entire process.

I also used the formative assessment strategy for my demo piece, which was to create a 3x3 grid of ideas for the overpainting. This is an assessment that forces the student to brainstorm before beginning a work and assesses their ability to create a fluency of ideas.

I don’t have a photo of my demo painting (which evolved into the title of ‘Happy Space Day!’), but I’ll add one to the blog later.

To begin the class, I waited until all the students were present before making announcements so I wouldn’t have to repeat myself. Because of the relaxed nature of the workshops, a few housekeeping items were getting overlooked and I could forsee them becoming a problem in the future. I tacked a written reminder on our board about first, putting names on everything they worked on, from sketches to final product and second, to leave all their work at the studio so that we, the instructors, had it for the final exhibition.

After that I referenced a written agenda for the day. I felt I needed to have something written down that reminded me what the order of events needed to be (do I demo first? Or do they pick their poster print first?) and also informed the students what they were going to be doing and in what order. Without this, I feel it would’ve been easy to forget a part of the lesson or for the girls to think it was acceptable to skip the matrix, for example.

After pointing out the agenda, I had the girls create a tea bag “splat” on a piece of paper. Then, in the interest of saving time, I handed out already dried tea splats and talked about Austin Kleon’s tea bag drawings.

I passed around my Ipad to show some images of his work, and then asked the students to create a drawing from their tea bag splat. While the students were working on their tea bag drawing, I handed the Ipad around again so they could look at images of David Irvine and Dave Pollot’s overpaintings.

During this time, I also had the students write a number down on a small piece of paper and put it into a box for later.


 The students' tea bag drawings:

After the tea bag drawings, I used the Rockwell print to demonstrate two ways of overpainting that I had worked out for this lesson. First, I demoed using tracing paper to layer new images on the poster and then coloring and blending on the tracing paper with markers. After that I demoed using acrylic paint to create new images on the prints and described how I achieved certain effects. I talked about color and value and discussed how to incorporate new imagery so that it didn’t just look as if it was slapped on top.
As Dr. Baldus was circulating in our workshop, she wondered if parts of shiny poster prints could be rubbed off with rubbing alcohol and a paper towel. We experimented and found that they could. So that was demoed as another alternative method for creating overpaintings.

After the demo we drew the students’ numbers (from before) to determine which order they would pick their prints in. This may not have been necessary, but I was worried two students may want the same print or that the more assertive students would get their first choice while the quieter students waited until last. There seemed to be enough prints available that there wasn’t any overlap or dissention this time. After that the students created their 3x3 matrix and then got to work. One student completed two overpaintings, some didn’t get done, but set theirs aside for later.

I was excited to see some experimentation and questioning. One student wanted to use her feet to create a footprint in the snow on her print, so she did. Another student wanted to know what a Nazi armband would look like, which was initially alarming, however I think the final result of this girl’s work was a satire of Nazis or an image that poked fun at them. Even if it hadn’t been we were instructed to not censor the students’ work, but rather to ask questions about their choices—a stance I agree with.  


I’m not sure I would change anything. I feel like it went fairly well. Maybe more access to internet so the students would have necessary source imagery right away, but they did pretty well with their phones and sharing. The lesson could be cleaner if students only used tracing paper and acrylic paint was not provided, but I feel some of the students were very interested and excited about using the paint.

The students really seemed to enjoy this lesson, and I certainly enjoyed watching them grapple with it. I think there was some hesitancy at first. Maybe similar to the anxious feeling an artist might have at “ruining” a pristine sketchbook. However, I think if this lesson was continued, the students would become more and more fluent and skilled at creating humorous or satirical images with this process.