articulated imaginary animals

This past Friday the kids in our school district had a ProD day, which means they were not in school while the teachers had a full day of planning, so I offered a morning two hour art workshop.

I have been admiring the work of Emma Kidd on Instagram for quite some time. I knew her art would be full heartedly embraced by students and have had the idea of creating a project inspired by her work for awhile. She has a lovely Etsy site where you can see lots of her work and here's a video of her talking about her artwork.

I was not wrong, the kids had a ball and created some wonderful articulated imaginary animals.

We started by playing the game Exquisite Corpse in order to get the ideas flowing.

The students changed seats to draw on each portion of the paper without being able to see what the student before had drawn. I gave open ended directions at each turn. 

Draw the head of your favorite animal.

Draw the body of something that likes the water.

Draw the legs of an animal that lives in Africa.

Lots of giggles as they returned to their seats and revealed the full drawings. The kids all shared the imaginary beings created in the game and then began to put together their own ideas for their articulated animals.

dragon, 5 year old

I gave each student a piece of watercolor paper and some copy paper to sketch out ideas along with 6 brass fasteners. The only instruction was their animal could not have more than six moving parts and to keep the joints large enough that it would hide the back of the fastener and not break when moving the part.

owl, 7 year old

Very quickly they figured out they could sketch the parts on the watercolor paper like a puzzle and not in order. This allowed them to make an animal much larger than the size of their paper. 

flying horse, 9 year old

Once they had their drawing on the final paper, they used watercolors to paint the parts and then cut them out.

solar panel flying lizard, 10 year old

By the time they finished cutting the parts, the paper was pretty dry and together we punched the holes where they wanted to put the brass fasteners. 

9 year old

Then they had the chance to use quill pens or sharpie pens to add lots of details using line and pattern.

10 year old

10 year old

By the time they were finished, parents were arriving and it was time to go home. There was something very magical about creating an artwork with moving parts for the students. I think there were all quite happy with themselves at the end.

unicorn mermaid, 9 year old

I think they would look absolutely wonderful mounted on paper and framed for display. I know if my grown children had brought one of these home when they were young it would definitely been on the wall in a hot minute.

10 year old

The icing on the cake was Emma Kidd seeing the students creations on the studio's Instagram page and being as thrilled as the students with the work. I hope the kids have as much fun playing with these at home as they did making them.