Flag Collage

In art class today, we continued with collage. We looked at two American artists who have done famous flag artpieces, Faith Ringgold and Jasper Johns. The kids dived right in. It was a lively mess.

You need:

old magazines

glue sticks or glue bottles

tagboard

scissors

Before class, I had torn out magazine pages with red and blue blocks of color on them. I also punched out some white paper flowers to be used for stars. (We thought that white letters might work for the stars too, but no one tried it.) I had made up tagboard (cut into quarters) templates for the kids to glue on. Be sure the kids are filling in with the correct colors in the correct places. We had one with the blue field on the wrong side, and we had two with red and blue stripes. This is an opportunity to teach them to re-think and save their project. The ones with the blue and red stripes were going to fill the "blue" field in with white, and use blue stars on it.

I encouraged the kids to use larger swatches of color with small scale text and images. Sometimes they will only use tiny pieces of pure color, which slows things down and stifles the loose creativity of collage. Also, I instructed them to turn type upside down or sideways so they are not so easily read, and so avoid an unwanted focal point.