Week 20: Mardi Gras Masks

This project turned into a real crowd pleaser!  The kids liked it and I think their results turned out great.


I try to do seasonal/historical things as much as possible and this ties into Mardi Gras season,  as well as being related to the kids' study of "Island Nations." In this case it was a Caribbean theme, whereas the tiki masks I did the week before were more Polynesian.  I ended up using these Mardi Gras masks as centerpieces for the International Lunch the kids had as a culmination of their Island Nation studies.  The ironic thing is that this theme was picked before the horrific Haitian earthquake and ended up being a great tie-in to some fundraising for Haiti.

This project also fits into my increasingly common use of paper plates as artistic materials. This is at least the third use of plates this year. Maybe I should write a book!;-)  I ended up using plates mainly as an economical alternative to the really costly masks you can buy in craft stores or really tim- consuming plaster method that I would do with older kids.

The prep involved getting small lunch plates and cutting them in half.  Then I used a 1" circle punch for eyes and nose.  A chopstick hot-glued on as a handle completed the work I did before class.

I find that the kids really like the assemblage projects that involve hot glue guns and "stuff."  Since I use the glue gun, this does make for a more intensive class since they lineup have me put the hot glue on their masks.

I printed out several examples of the real masks and gave them a quick background on the signigance of Mardi Gras, Lent and Easter. This being a Christian school probably allows for more leeway in this respect.  I also showed them that the official colors are purple, yellow and green.

For materials I gave the kids colored feathers, sequins, ribbon, pop-poms and markers.  It is amazing how colorful and festive they ended up looking with just a few simple embelishments.  The kids spent so much time making these, that we needed almost two classes to complete.

WEEK 19: Tiki masks

Many of the kids had been to Hawaii so were familiar with the look.  I had them fold their paper in half to help with the symmetry, and tried to get them to use bold distorted shapes for the facial features.

The school has an International Lunch every year and this year's theme is "Island Nations" like the South Pacific, Japan, Australia, the Carribean, etc.  They like to decorate the room, and this project is catered to that.  I printed out a bunch of Tiki images and Maori masks as examples for the kids.

To give them a bit of character, I had them use brown paper and a simplified color scheme of black marker and one or two crayons.  Some kids used more colors but they turned out well. As final touch I had them delicately crumple and then re-flatten their work, so it looked like bark or rustic wood.

African masks, Spring 2009

To bring some international flair to our projects we did African masks with brown paper. I had brought in a bunch of printouts of African masks from the web, and showed the kids. What I didn't expect was that at this age, they felt compelled to copy individual masks, eventhough I said they could use their imagination!  What resulted was fascinating, since many did a great job of doing a copy, and some integrated parts of the printouts.

The "primitive" nature of many of the original masks, really lent itself to the "clumsy" way that these young kids painted. The final masks had a lot of character!


Here was an actual physical mask that we brought in as an example.



This boy did a great job of duplicating this mask!