Arts Explorer #6 - Painting with Scissors

When thinking about this blog entry, I considered many possibilities of how to fill in the blank "________ with scissors".  When we think of what we can do using scissors, the first thing most people think is cutting.  Children are encouraged to pick up scissors and cut out designs and pictures, usually to glue onto something else to create some sort of picture or collage.  I considered different "art" verbs and matched them with activities using scissors. 

I decided that I wanted to use scissors in a way that I have never used them before.  For this activitiy, I chose to DRAW with scissors.  After making this decision, I found myself stuck on HOW I was supposed to draw with scissors.  I thought long and hard, and decided to make playdough.  Playdough is soft and smooth, so I figured a pair of scissors would smoothly run through it and leave a picture.  I added blue food colouring to my playdough because it is my favourite colour.  Once I had my blue playdough ready to go, I realized I had to think of something to draw.  Thinking back to my childhood and activities I did at school and camp, I knew exactly what I wanted to draw.  The one thing that I always incorporate into activities was memories from my cottage!  Having a blue sheet of playdough rolled out in front of me, I grabbed my scissors and began to run my scissors along the playdough to create waves.  This sparked an idea in my head.  On one half of my sheet, I drew out me and my sister playing in the waves at my cottage.  I continued the waves on the second half, but made them bigger.  With the recent news about the tsunami in Japan, I made a connection between my experiences playing in the waves at my cottage to these HUGE waves desroying the villages in Japan.  On the second half of my page, I illustrated (well I tried) waves crashing down on houses and wiping out cars, and a helicopter rescuing a person off the roof of a house.

Art word of the week:  L

                                     I

                                    N

                                    E

I used lines to create a picture in playdough.  A line is a marking created by a tool.  In this case, I used scissors.  Lines create shape and dimension.