2016 Dale Chihuly Sculpture
Been wondering what the Art students did with all of those plastic bottles you saved for us? We created a Chihuly sculpture. Chihuly what????? Dale Chihuly is a who, not a what. He is a famous glass blowing artist who revolutionized how glass blowing was created and viewed. Dale Chihuly injured his shoulder in an accident and could no longer do glass blowing himself. What some people would have thought of as an end to a career he used to create glass sculptures in a whole new way. He hired others to do the actual glass blowing while he stepped back and did the designing and choreographing the process. The result is large glass sculptures that hang in over 200 mueseums.
I saw a way students could create their own Chihuly sculpture on Pinterest by using paint and plastic bottles. There were several methods but we settled on painting the inside of the bottle with acrylic paint and water. The students squirted their assigned color into a bottle, added some water, put the lid and shook the bottle until the entire inside was coated. The excess paint was poured out and used on the next bottle. The bottles were turned upside down in a plastic, yogurt cup that was lined with cupcake liner to drain. The liners made clean up quick and painless.
After the bottles drained for a day, they were cut into a spiral and the bottoms cut off. They were allowed to dry another day. A piece of pipe cleaner was wired to the top of the bottle. A long wire was hung from a pipe in the Art room and the bottles were wired to it one by one starting with red. The colors went in the order of the color wheel. Each class was assigned a color. The little kids had the primary colors. First grade was yellow, Second was red and Third had blue. The older students decorated with the secondary colors. Fourth had orange, Fifth green and the Sixth grade finished up with purple.
The students were able to learn about a famous glass artist, turning what could have been a career ender into a whole new career and learning to work as a team, not to mention reinforcing what they knew about colors and the color wheel. Click on the photo corners to view their work.
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