Affordable Art for The Middle Level

As my art budget has slowly shrunk and the cost of supplies has hit an all time high, I have tried to work with inexpensive materials or even free materials.  Paper offers an affordable material and provides a wealth of textures, diverse density, and numerous manipulations options.

Origami: I am always amazed by the amount of students who are proficient in origami.  It really renews my faith in children’s ability to self teach and create.   Yes, thank you, they can do something more than Guitar Hero.  Students love to learn more origami and they gladly will teach other the skills to create!

If you don’t have Origami Paper you can use copy paper.

This is my favorite Origami book:

Paper Creations Easy to Make Origami Projects
By Gay Merrill Gross
Friedman Fairfax

         

3-D Bas Relief:  When supplies come in July the first thing I do is put everything away but the second thing I do is break down the boxes for a Bas Relief creation that my 7th graders love.  All that cardboard plus donations from my local auto body shop will be the base for student’s creation.

Altered books: Our town library always has a shelf of free books.  From this shelf I gather books.  If the librarian knew I was going to allow my students to cut tear, draw, or paste into these books she might have a stroke.  Never the less, the books are free and used as the springboard for our altered book projects.

Here are two of my favorite books on Altered Books

Altered Books Workshop
18 Creative Techniques for Self-Expression
By Bev Brazelton
North Light Books

Altered Books, Journals and other Adventures in Bookmaking
By Holly Harrison
Rockport

Cereal Box Sculpture:  This year I wanted to touch upon recycled art so I asked my staff and parents to save cereal boxes.  Students studied Cubism, which helped them to understand abstracting an animals figure, and I believe the results were amazing!  An interesting observation was the direction of the creative process my students took.  Most students were linear thinkers.  They placed one box on top of the other.  A few students were able to create angles and cantilevered constructions.

Book Making: Over the years I have taught Book Making in many forms.  The process is relatively inexpensive.  You can use simple copy paper for the pages of the book.  The covers are made from mat board from my local frame shop.  The frame shop donates their scrapes.  Book covers can embellished with specialty papers, wrapping paper, aluminum foil etc.

Kids are amazed by the book assignments and love to create unique books.   Here are some great reference books:

Unique Handmade Books
By Alisa Golden
Sterling Publishing Co.

The Art and Craft of Handmade Cards
By Diane Maurer – Mathison
Watson – Guptill Publications

Picture Frames: My local frame shop is a wonderful source for donations.  The shop owner saves me any old frames that a customer might discard when having a piece of artwork reframed.

I now have a large collection of frames in all sizes and shapes. Students gesso the frames and paint them black.  Children then add bright color patterns and designs to the frames to create beautiful finished frames.

Then I took old file cabinet metal and cut and fitted the metal into the frames.  The frames were hung in the cafeteria.  Using Small Magnets I can mount student artwork inside the frames to the metal sheet.  Changing the artwork is so simple with the magnets and each artwork has a beautiful frame around it.

I’m sure you have lots of ways to allow your students to create on a shoestring budget.  Why don’t you share your ideas below?