Using tag board, tempera cakes, cardboard, and oil pastels we paid homage to one of my favorite artists, Frank Stella. We began by talking about organic and geometric shapes and looked at Stella's work. We discussed the fact that Stella's shapes often had shapes inside of them, and decided that this would be important to include in our work. We also looked at the variety of sizes of the shapes that Stella uses in his work. Students began by coming up with 10 shapes to use in their work and drew these on tag board. Once the shapes were drawn and cut out, we decided what shapes we wanted to cut other shapes into. We folded our shapes and made a cut with scissors, then opened up the shape to cut out the second shape. Using tempera cakes we painted our shapes and our background paper over several art classes. The paint looked better with several layers applied. Once the desired color was achieved we cut small pieces of cardboard and glued them to the back of the shapes. The cardboard provided a "lift" to the tag board to give them a three dimensional appearance. Once the cardboard was dry students glued their shapes in to place on their background paper, remembering to overlap some of the shapes as Stella does in his work. After the glued shapes were allowed to dry, we used oil pastels to give the appearance of etched lines that appear in Stella's shapes.
