What’s more romantic than hanging out in the studio, hot cocoa in my thermos and paint on my hands?
For this Valentine’s day, I teamed up with The Arts Center in Corvallis to spend the evening expressing my love of crafting in a special workshop making jewelry with polymer clay!
Although it’s not my main artform, I love crafting with polymer clay. I like the feeling of being able to make something I can hold in my hand, with relatively accessible materials and equipment. For this class, we used Sculpey Premo polymer clay in various colors, acrylic paint, bakeable clay adhesive, gold foil. We also used various clay tools including rollers, styluses, and ball tools. This class was designed to be beginner-friendly, with step-by-step instruction and the goal of a completed project in 2 hours.
We started out the evening working on faux quartz charms for earrings, broaches, and necklace pendants. The process includes cutting transparent clay down and mixing it with a small amount of acrylic paint. Then we used bakeable adhesive and gold or silver foil to replicate the veins in quartz stone. We then rolled out slabs to cut or shape into desired pieces. Through the process, we got hands on with conditioning clay and using tools. The end products were really lovely!
The second half of the workshop focused on making jewelry from clay slabs, which included selecting contrasting colors, shaping pieces and then layering to create cool designs. In this process, folks got to experiment with representational pieces that evoked memories of classic jewelry elements, as well as abstract pieces that embraced the vibrant colors and textures of the clay.
This was a super fun way to spend Valentine’s evening with a group of cool folks just making stuff! Thanks so much to The Arts Center for hosting our workshop!
Want to know about other classes like this one? Follow this blog for updates!
Create beautiful statement pieces or subtle accents in this clay jewelry class
Practice techniques in making faux quartz and decorated slab pieces for earrings, pendants and rings. In this class, students will learn basics in hand building and shaping; we’ll bake our pieces in-studio so that at the end, you’ll have jewelry ready to wear or give as a gift!
Perfect for pairs and groups looking to spend a romantic night of crafting with tea and treats available at The Arts Center.
Monster Makers Art Camp: Students will learn about animals and plants that are adapted to live in particular environments around the world; they will create new amalgam creatures (Monsters!) with different animal and plant characteristics and an environment their creature can live in.
Skills: research, discussion, sketching, polymer clay handbuilding, use of clay tools, presentation of ideas, reasoning, connection of researched ideas into a final product.
Coos Bay Public Library, Coos Bay, OR (1-day workshop coming Winter 2022)
I love this monster makers camp, and I was so excited to be invited in the summer of 2022 to visit The Annex Charter School in Ontario, OR and make some monsters with students as part of their amazing STEAM month! Ontario is right on the Oregon-Idaho border, directly on the other side of the state from where I live in the Willamette Valley. Located in the Snake River Plain ecoregion, The Annex Charter School is in a completely different environment from what I’m used to.
My visit to Ontario was organized with Art Center East’s Artists in Rural Schools Program made possible in part by The Reser Family Foundation, Marie Lamfrom Charitable Foundation, and Lamb Foundation. Art Center East is an arts organization serving Eastern Oregon with all kinds of amazing art opportunities including gallery exhibits, creative community events, an art shop, and connecting artists with rural schools. See more about Art Center East and the work they do at artcentereast.org
With a whole week for our camp, we had lots of time to work on developing sketching skills, research, and claywork. Each day of the camp and each new project lead directly into the next, so that students could connect ideas and practices throughout the week.
We took our sketchbooks outside to draw plants and objects we could find in the school playground, starting with basic shapes and adding details to our sketches.
For this iteration of Monster Makers, I did some extra research to make the information accessible to the students specific to their home and local environment. I created an interactive slideshow with Google Slides, that students used to learn about animals from different ecologies, including the Snake River Plain ecoregion.
Students used laptops and worked together in pairs or groups to learn about animals and adaptations they have developed to thrive in their environments. We discussed what we observed and students took notes and sketched different kinds of animals in their sketchbooks.
The notes and sketches students made in their books informed their designs for clay creatures. We practiced polymer clay techniques, starting with simple forms and adding pieces or using tools to shape their creatures.
While we waited for the clay to bake and cool, students also created environment dioramas, using cut paper and drawing to make 3D popup scenes for their creatures to inhabit.
At the end of the week, students shared their work with family and friends in the community in an Open House hosted by the school to showcase all the cool things students made during STEAM camp. There was honestly a lot of cool stuff, including a bridge build challenge, flying things, and slime (who doesn’t love SLIME?!)
Check out some of the local media about The Annex Charter School’s STEAM Open House:
This camp was filled with so much creative thinking and surprising creations from students, and I also got to learn a lot about an ecological environment I didn’t know much about (which I LOVE). Thanks again to Art Center East for helping put this camp together and connecting me with such a wonderful community and school!
In Summer 2021, I got to work with some creative minds at The Arts Center in Corvallis, OR, in a Monsters Maker 4-day camp for kids.
In this camp, students created their own creatures using illustration, image references, sculpting and making considerations for where and how the creatures might live and what physical adaptations the creatures would need to survive. This camp ignited so much creativity and inventiveness among the students and encouraged sharing ideas, inspiring each other and joining their imaginations. While our focus was mainly on using the sculpting tools and being creative with our stories about our creatures, this camp can be adapted to meet more rigorous science and biology standards for early education.
In this post, I’ll share my camp outline and some of the resources and discussion we used in this camp. This outline can be adapted to different ages, contexts and physical abilities.
Set up & Goals
Schedule: 4 days, 1.5 hours per day (6 hours total) In-person
Ages: 6 – 13 years old (1st – 6th grade) Note: since this was designed as a summer camp, I kept the ages pretty broad to accomodate families. As a school program, I would offer this for narrower age ranges (1st & 2nd grade, 3rd & 4th, etc.) and make changes to my discussion points and objectives for different age groups. Keeping the ages broad meant that my focus was more on the skills of art-making rather than being specific to science learning, although there’s lots of room for adaptation and change with this outline!
Camp overview/ learning objectives: Students will:
Discuss habitats and physical adaptations of animals to exist in those habitats
Share their ideas with and respond to the ideas of their peers
Practice drawing skills with shapes and details
Work with polymer clay and special tools to create unique objects
Write about their creations as characters, developing a world for their character to occupy
Share their work and respond to the work of others
Materials & Equipment:
Sketchbook
Cardstock
Drawing and coloring materials
Pencils
Erasers
Waterproof pens – (Micron 12)
Markers
Colored pencils
Polymer clay (oven bake)
Clay tools
Polymer clay glaze
Paintbrush
Aluminum foil (full roll)
Adult only use: Toaster oven, safely plugged in and placed in well-ventilated area
Optional: findings for jewelry, key chains to turn figures into toys
Adult only use: Epoxy glue for broken pieces
Environmental Set up:
Tables and chairs for each student to sit or stand comfortably & safely while working and interacting with others
Access to bathroom/ hand washing stations
Materials and tools for each student (clay, clay tools, paper, drawing tools)
Table for educator to demonstrate, visible by all students, or the ability to walk around, if needed
Extra supplies nearby
Toaster oven easily monitored by adults, in a well-ventilated area, safely plugged in
Space for cooling sculptures after they are removed from the oven
Introductions & Agreements
In all of my classes/ residencies/ camps, I’ll start off with student introductions and an overview of the class. For youth classes, I’ll also work on agreements for the class, which I’ll write up and have available to look at and review for each of the class sessions.
Student Introductions: Say your name, pronouns, and choose one place to live: the boreal forest, the rainforest, the ocean, a city, the desert, the savanna, the tundra, or somewhere else (tell us)
Bonus (to engage student experience and ability): What is something you could teach the rest of us?
Class Agreements: (These agreements help set the tone for the class, and are a useful place to return to when things start to feel “off track” in a way that might leave some students behind.)
Try – some things we do might be new/uncomfortable/ difficult or even seem boring, and our job is to try our best as much as we can!
Non-judgemental language – When we look at each other’s artwork and share our own, let’s avoid words like “Good” “Bad” or “Like” and let’s think about what we can ask the artist about their work, what their work reminds us of, and if it’s our art, what we might want to change or try that’s different.
Share – Be willing to share your work so we can learn from each other and get new ideas!
Experiment – Try something different when you can, be curious about the materials, tools, and find different ways to use them or create something new!
Observations & Discussion
In this first day of the class, we looked at examples of ecosystems in our opening, starting off the conversation with an idea that we’ll be creating creatures that would exist in an environment they were adapted for (even if the creature and the environment were both imaginary). We look at examples of boreal forest, rainforest, ocean, cities, deserts, savanna and tundras and ask observational questions:
What do you notice about this environment?
What do you think a creature would need to live in this environment?
What else are you curious about this environment?
We also looked at examples of real-life animals and imaginary creatures. I brought a set of reference images for the class to look over and started our discussion again, this time encouraging students to use their sketchbooks to sketch out physical elements (ears, tails, horns, wings, etc.) from the animals that they were interested in or curious to explore more. Students were invited to pick an animal from the pictures on their desks (the students had different collections of images) and talk about their creature:
What is something you notice about this creature?
Where do you think this creature could live, and what physical elements do you think help it to be adapted to its environment?
I try to dive in immediately with art-making, since that’s really the hook of the class: students want to MAKE!
Drawing Practice
When students are working on drawing, it’s my goal as an arts educator to preserve the organic impulse to create immediately. I encourage students to look again at the references I’ve provided them, along with any of the sketches or doodles they’ve made so far. After 10 – 15 minutes of leaving space for students to explore, I’ll begin to make suggestions for approaching drawing practice, while also still preserving room for students to follow their own paths.
Start with basic shapes: using a reference as an example, I demonstrate how to find the most basic shape that’s similar to the biggest parts of the reference. For example, I’ll show an image of a bunny and how the body of the bunny is round like a circle, and start by drawing that, making adjustments with my pencil and eraser as I go. As I go over the different parts of the bunny, I’ll find more shapes and add those on top to make a bunny shape.
Next, I’ll start adding details like eyes and noses, and remind students that this is where we can get creative with different features and think about where our bunny-creature might live (add wings for an aerial bunny? a flexible tail for a tree-dwelling bunny? big scooping claws for an underground bunny?). This is a fun moment to invite students up to the demonstration drawing to add their own elements and talk about how this changes where the creature might live or what it might be able to do.
Students use their sketchbooks throughout the camp, referring back to doodles as they create with clay.
Polymer Clay Practice
On the first day, I try to also get clay into kids’ hands as soon as possible so they can start to experience this medium and imagine ways to use it right away. I’ll encourage them to explore the medium first, share any observations or questions about it with each other and also share some guidelines. These guidelines will be repeated throughout the entire camp, so I try not to take up too much space at first by trying to say everything all at once.
Observations:
The clay starts out hard when it comes from the package
Artists can warm it up and soften the clay with their hands by kneading it and smooshing it or using the roller (clay tool) to smooth it out. This is conditioning the clay
When we make something we want to keep, we’ll bake the clay in the oven. The clay will harden in the oven and stay that shape forever! But until we bake the clay, we can still change things about the creatures and objects we make.
Recommendations, Tool use
Use a small amount at a time
Figures can’t be too big or they won’t bake well – try to keep them to about palm-size
Don’t see the color you want? Try mixing colors together!
Like drawing, shape simple forms (balls, pyramids, cubes)
Use tools to attach with scoring
Use tools to smooth out finger prints
If clay feels sticky, allow it to cool on your foil
Things to consider with polymer clay: too thick, the clay might not cure evenly, too thin, the clay might be brittle and break easily when handling it
Details can be carved into the clay and then painted after being baked
Marbling colors is also a cool way to get effects
Wash hands before and after clay use
Polymer clay is not appropriate for food use
Demonstrating Techniques
One of the first projects I’ll demonstrate to the students is to make figures using balls and snakes: by creating large or small clay balls and pressing them together (this is a way to make the body shape of some creatures), or creating a long thing clay snake that can be coiled or twisted for cool effects (like making tails or horns).
I also demonstrate tool use to create details and to join pieces of clay together by first scoring the clay in the spots where they will be joined. This will prevent the pieces from falling apart after baking.
Sometimes that falling apart happens, anyway, and so having a small tube of epoxy glue to mend broken pieces was very useful.
For baking times, I follow the directions for the materials I use, making sure to bake in my toaster oven that’s specifically for polymer clay pieces (I got mine cheap off of a community board), and kept in a well-ventilated area. I also make sure to keep the students aware of the bake and cool down times so that they know they can look at their pieces but they won’t be able to touch them until they’re fully cooled.
Some students wanted to make necklaces and keychains with their clay pieces, so I helped them prep their pieces before baking by adding holes for jump rings that we could attach after baking.
World Building
While students create and have their pieces baked, I encourage them to write and draw their creature’s environment:
Where does it live
What does it eat
What does it usually surround itself with (treasure, tools, other creatures…)
Students can illustrate their scenes on cards that we fold to create backdrops for their creatures. I also encourage students to create character cards about their creatures, which includes information about the creature:
Creature’s name
Favorite food?
What’s its special abilities?
What is it afraid of?
What makes this creature unique?
As a special element of the class, I also created stickers for the students using their drawings and my die-cut machine at home.
Outcomes, Further Exploration & Adaptations
As the week went on, the students became more familiar with the tools and materials and created some amazing pieces. The depth of detail and imagination that went into their creations was truly impressive. This camp could have been adapted into a deeper exploration into ecosystems in which the students’ creations lived and worked alongside each other.
Accessibility adaptations to consider:
The motor skills of the student: for some students a softer clay like paper clay may be more accessible. Paperclay is definitely different from polymer clay, and it can be wetted with water to make it softer, as well as baked in the oven. The use of cookie cutters or molds to help shape clay is a great way to also increase accessibility, where students can use those to get started and then add details on top.
The smell and tactile feel of the clay should be considered and may be offensive to sensitive students.
This was such a fun camp in the summer, and it’s an outline I’m continuing to develop for my other residencies and classes for kids. If you’re an educator or artist and plan to use some of these ideas, tell me about it! I’d love to hear about any changes you make or challenges you come up with in your experience!
This camp was made by The Atelierista and shared openly to make arts education accessible to everyone! Educators, artists and students are encouraged to use this description to explore and learn more about creativity and art-making. If you like this and want to support The Atelierista (and get updates and exclusive content access), check out the Patreon page and consider becoming a member!
