Art Students Create Monsters

SEELEY LAKE – Seeley-Swan High School (SSHS) art teacher Danni Parcell found an innovative way to teach her students the difference between shape and form, between 2-D and 3-D art. The project required participation by the lower elementary school students.

Seeley Lake Elementary (SLE) teacher Maggie Burwick told her first graders to, "Draw a monster – a scary monster, a happy monster – any kind of monster you want." Swan Valley Elementary (SVE) kindergarten, first and second grade students were given the same instructions. Parcell collected all the resulting drawings and challenged her art students to turn the monster drawings into 3-D pieces of art.

Parcell's students accepted the challenge. Senior Stephanie Robbins said, "It sounded really, really interesting actually. Especially to make it with clay. It's so much more fun when you can make it with your hands, give form to it, make it three-dimensional."

The students took almost two weeks of class time working on the project. Some of the students worked on two different pictures so that all of the drawings would have a 3-D representation.

Senior Marisol Caro said, "The hardest part was taking what they drew and putting it into your own mind and adding your own creativity to it." She gave an example: "Like instead of having the legs dangle, make them sit down."

Caro said of one of her pieces, "It was kind of hard. He [the kindergartener who made the picture] had lines coming out of it. So we thought it was a good idea to add wire, instead of drawing lines on with paint. Adding wire pieces made it more 3-D, instead of trying to stick clay out."

There were other difficulties with converting the children's flat drawings into 3-D objects. The drawing Robbins chose was detailed. She said, "The pieces were so small that they would break when they were being fired. I had to glue them back on."

One of the drawings Caro chose was of a two-headed monster. She said, "Instead of connecting the heads with clay, I connected them with a paper clip. I stuck a hole in the clay and then fired it and connected the heads later."

Parcell said she assumed that, as with their other art projects, the high school students would take their clay creations home after completing the assignment. She said the students asked, "Well, aren't we going to give them to the kids? And I was like, 'Oh, that's a great idea!'"

Parcell first displayed the finished monsters and the corresponding pictures in the high school library so that the art students' classmates could see them. Parcell said, "Some of [the clay monsters] are pretty darn cute."

The displays were then moved to SLE and SVE. When the young artists came in to see what the high school artists had created, there was a lot of finger pointing and cries of, "There's mine."

Then came more specific comments:

"I was trying to do that. I was trying to do what the kid [high school art student] did!"

"Mine is the best."

"They did mine the same exact way I did mine."

"Mine is so awesome!"

"I'm so happy! I want to show my dad. I want to show dad tonight."

Parcell told the youngsters she wanted to keep the displays up in the elementary schools for a couple of weeks so that all the other students could see them.

That prompted one first-grader to ask, "Can we keep mine up here forever?"

Parcell said she got the idea for the art assignment from a similar project sponsored by the Zootown Arts Community Center in Missoula.