FLY Challenge: Resistance is Futile (Watercolor and Crayon)
Although this is a project we do a lot, we believe that using materials on a regular basis is important. We don’t always convey exactly the same information, and in any case, the students who are present shape the direction of the work and the experimentation.
Art
FLY Fishing (in progress)
Color play
Minecraft
Starry Nite
Try
Stalacmites?
Beginning of Art
Try again
Pollock meets de Koening in Watercolor
Lion
Lion before painting
Minecraft II
If at first you don’t succeed
Colorful Experiment
Whether you succeed or not, try, try again!
There was one student at Romulus who threw his watercolor painting away. I saw him working on a new one and went to look for it. “Name,” I cajoled, “In FLY art, there’s no such thing as a mistake, only a problem to solve.” Then I took a sponge and wiped off the smudge with a sponge, and handed it back to him, “All fixed.”
“Wow,” he blurted, “Miss Allida can fix anything”
He then attempted and succeeded at creating the design in different combinations a couple more times, using the sponge when things went awry. The design he created is the one with the stripes in the slideshow above.
It makes me so proud to see students building up resistance to problems that they encounter. He had been so discouraged to throw away his work, something he’d spent time on. But when he saw the problem was fixable, he was not only excited, but took the technique and tried it himself.
Wax was not the only kind of resistance they learned about that day!