Day 7: Volcanic Art

This day was a bit of a whirlwind. We started off by continuing our theme of the extinction event with “volcanic art”. We had talked previously about how the asteroid that hit Earth set off massive volcanic eruptions known as the Deccan traps.

The techniques we were learning were gouache and ink resist and paper marbling.

To start I demonstrated how to do the gouache resist technique. We used canvas and paper for our gouache and ink paintings, but unless the students applied their gouache very thickly on the canvas, it tended to wash off more than we would have liked. The paper worked much better for this project.

After we had our gouache paintings dry and then covered with a layer of ink, we spent about twenty minutes making a papier-mache volcano scene complete with rocks, gravel, and dinosaurs.

After the volcano was constructed, the students tried their hand at paper marbling. They absolutely loved marbling. When they saw the paint floating on the surface and how it spread with each success drop they all “oohed” and “ahhed”. They were even more amazed when I showed them how to swirl the paint in patterns with toothpicks. When I pulled a print they were still awed. One student exclaimed “I like that!” repeatedly and another said “It’s like magic!”

Each student pulled 3-4 good marbled prints. Toward the end, the students started experimenting and playing with the size and the paint. Even though I repeatedly told them that not following the directions would just make a muddy mess or cause the paint to sink, they still apparently needed to see it for themselves. Too much paint was squirted into the size at once, their swirling became fast and frenetic and the successive prints were mostly uninteresting.

At this point we starting cleaning up the marbling and students began rinsing the extra ink off their gouache paintings. This was when we discovered that the watercolor paper worked much better. But we still had some good results.

Here is a video of students marbling: