In my AVT 595 class, our professor made a sketchbook that will be passed around in the class for the semester. Every week, a student will finish a spread that the previous student started, create one full spread, and start a new spread for the next student to finish. The content of your assigned spreads and pages were based on the lessons and discussions for the week.
The previous student JoAnn, had created a silhouette of a face with an origami rose that represented the brain. As we were discussing artmaking problems, big ideas, and curriculum development, I decided to explore my big idea which is geopolitical inequities, specifically Climate Change. As I develop my idea and curriculum something I want to focus on helping with climate change locally.
I wanted to explore my lesson and big idea in my assigned spreads to make personal connections to the lesson I am developing.
To achieve this, my original idea was to use candy wrappers as with Halloween coming up, a lot of candy wrappers end up in landfills. I wasn't able to continue with this idea because I needed candy wrappers which I did not have and I did not want to create the materials for the project myself as it adds to the problem. I asked one of my close friends, who is very passionate about climate change and is majoring in Environmental Science, for ideas. She suggested using shredded paper from my office as we shred a lot of different colored papers, which cannot be recycled.
I took a Ziploc full of the shredded paper and separated them by color in an empty egg carton. In the mix I also shredded a paper bag that had a plastic lining after separating the paper and plastic lining.
I started gluing the shredded paper around the origami rose and the silhouette of the person that JoAnn had made, in rays that were shooting in to the silhouette to symbolize the information we are gaining as we research for developing our curriculum. I added pink in the middle of the rose that represents the brain to symbolize knowledge.
Then I starting gluing the pink going from near the mouth to the rest of the page with the word 'knowledge' in the middle to show the knowledge that we are sharing as we share our lessons and curriculum .
After finishing the spread, I decided to move to the last spread where I start a page for the next student to finish. I did this because wanted to see if the paint markers I was planning on using would bleed through the page.
For the page, I decided to draw Marshall high school since we will be going for a site visit there the next week. I left the other side blank for the next student to finish.
As I suspected, the paint marker blend through to the other side
After figuring out the paint markers, I decided to move to the middle spread. I started by gluing two pieces of black card stock that I cut in to two pieces. Then I drew a light bulb in the middle with 'big idea written' below with paint markers. Next I added small sticky notes with big ideas to show how there are a lot of big ideas that we are developing further/
Finally, I added some of the shredded paper mix in a Ziploc bag to the folder where the sketchbook is stored for others to use.
