Panther Shadow Painting

Shadow Paintings

Dates: Monday, April 10th and Wednesday, April 12th

Groups Participating: Panther Boys and Girls Club Teens

Attendance: 5 teens

Big idea: Create 3 dimesional sculptures that caste shadows creating 2 dimensional paintings.

Directions: Each teen had an overhead desklamp above the butcher paper, a hot glue gun and various wooden materials to work with. They also started by building a wooden stand to start thier sculpture with, that being a wide, flat wooden piece with a long wooden dowel attached by being drilled and stuck into it. From thier stands they built thier shadow paintings depending on the challenge presented. Here are some challenge ideas...

1) Create a shadow painting that looks like the first letter of your name.

2) Create a shadow that creates a shape (square, triangle, rectangle, circle), however, the sculpture itself looks nothing like the shape.

3) Create a shadow that looks like your favorite animal. Then trace it on a piece of paper to keep.

4) Create a sculpture that has a shadow that creates half an image, where the other half of the image is drawn on the table itself, therefore the image is incomplete without the light.

Attendance: Panther Boys and Girls Club Teens

Supplies: Overhead desk lamps, stools (to put lamps ontop of), vices (to tighten lamps onto stools), extra lightbulbs, butcher paper, hot glue guns, hot glue, various small wood pieces, other assorted craft materials, markers

Best part: Seeing the images come alive as they worked. This activity takes time and patience, but as you can see from the pictures when kid's got going they came up with some creative images. Also, putting the final sculptures on display in our "window gallery" for passer-biers to view. Even without the shadows they turned out looking like modern art.

Hardest part: Just as when we tried this in this past, the hardest part for our group was crafting stable structures that would not bend after a certain amount of time. This part took patience and some time learning the best way to craft the structures. Another challenge was keeping the sculptures themselves interesting looking, even without the shadows. This was best done by creating the lines in your shadow image through crafting the wooden pieces at variuos unexpected planes above the table. After learning that trick the sculptures started coming alive.
Improvements: Allow plenty of set up time, bring extra lightbulbs in case they burn out, and don't forget to give a quick reminder about the safety issues with glue guns.