Incredible insects at art mini-camp

 The group began the week creating books to capture some of the projects for the week. I pulled art work from Pixar's Antz and Bugz for them to use as examples. They then colored their drawings with colored pencils. We worked on shading some of the edges.




Most of the group saw the egg critters the younger kids made earlier in the day and had to create one. It was good learning on use of glue guns and design.




 For the next project we used milk cartons and a variety of woody items, pine cones and glue to create a bug habitat. This group did not want bugs to inhabit these and were generally not into insects--hard crowd on this but the trip to look for bugs turned into more of a science project as they discovered their magnifying glasses could concentrate light and ignite leaves and wood fuzz. 

Edible projects are fun to do and usually intrigue most of the kids. I secured kits from the Smithsonian to make gummy bugs. They had to measure and mix and use pipettes to fill the forms. A day's wait and removing the gummy bugs was a bit hard but we got it done. Apparently they didn't taste too bad as they were all gone.

 We worked with clay a lot over the last 2 days and a couple of kinds of clay and processes. The cornstarch clay was a bust for sculpting but we made it thinner and layered it onto cards to do a puffy project. Into the microwave for 20-30 seconds and they were amazed to have puffed bugs to paint. The flour/salt clay made up well and each of the campers has a tray full of creations--penguins, computers, sofas, pizza--no insects but great work with the palette knives and shaping. So much so that we made a 2nd batch to work with in class.

Kat thought they would like to draw the Tracker Jacker from Hunger Games and the Mockingjay so led them in the drawing project. The drawings are really good and the coloring and shading are coming along.








We discussed scarab beetles and their place in Egyptian culture then used Fimo clay to create one for our last project. Our favorite example was the brightly colored beetle with metallic blue, green and gold. some painted their this way but most went for bits of gold. They learned how to soften and manipulate this clay and make legs and eyes stick.