This was the project, to celebrate the 50th year of Kingston School and do a bit of Character Ed in the process. We used Liquid Mark permanent markers, Sharpie and Bic markers. Don't let them press too hard with the markers, describe it like 'floating the marker' over the vinyl, it gives a less streaky look. It is a little sticky when it dries if they put too much on. Use a piece of newsprint or wax paper to separate each piece from class to class to avoid the projects sticking and staining each other. Learned this the HARD way! Each kid took home their work at the end.
This window bank goes the length of a long hallway at my school. The kids each had a piece of vinyl 7"x9" to work on. The little ones did birthday party decorations I copied from black outline clip art and they colored in with the vinyl. We taped the vinyl on top of the clip art. They colored in the shapes and outlined with black sharpie.
I took a digital photo of every kid 2-5th grade up against a white paper background. I cropped the photos to a 5"x7" size. inside the 7"x9" file. zThen I made a 1" borderline around the edge. Tthen I put them through a filter in photoshop that made them into a high contrast gray scale value posterized version. This can all be done in a batch, fortunately. The emphasis was finding the shapes and values. Yes, it was a LOT of work and ink from my printer at home. I stored them all on a CD to go back and forth. I would never do this with 2nd grade again, too young! The hardest part for the younger kids was only outlining on top of the existing lines. They wanted to just make whatever shape they believed that the eye or nose should be and not trace only the lines that were there. This is a close-up of a self portrait done by a 3rd grader..
I taped the vinyl on their face picture. First they traced over the black border. Then they did the outline of their head, neck, shirt. They outlined with black sharpie the boldest lines they could find of hair, eyes, nose, mouth shirt, etc. They need to KEEP IT SIMPLE! Then they colored only the eye color and hair color, adding black sharpie details again after that. They could color the shirts any color and also we added a border of a repeat pattern. Some did sports stuff, some used their names, etc. I had 5th grade 'art aides' come in at their lunch recess to help me do all this taping, outlining and mounting. It was really hard for the 2nd graders. I would take home the stack and watch TV and find more lines to get the portraits a little more detailed.
The next year I taught them about the monarch butterfly life cycle. The 3rd-5th grades made butterflies using Character education words in the symmetrical design. They drew their 1/2 butterfly on folded paper and I showed them how to make the other half by folding the pencil drawing inside out, then rubbing hard with the handle of the scissors to make a transfer of the lines. This is what they used under the vinyl to color in first, then outline. Make sure yellow or orange is the first color they use, dark colors and sharpie outline last. See the word TRUST as part of the design.
Have them put their name at the bottom of the project so you know which side to place on the window. I had kids helping to do it on the lower windows and that avoided putting the marker side touching the window. If the name could be read, that was the side facing you. The 3rd and 4th grade just put a character ed word 'floating' in a large shape using a dark or black sharpie at the end of the coloring process. A
1st grade did "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" for their part and the 2nd grade made milkweed stalks.
5th grade used the letters of Character Ed words as dividing lines in one of the wings as a design element. Here you can see HONESTY
