After a very successful Art Workshop with my Class of Post 19 young adults with Special Needs, where we looked at a formulaic approach to painting a stylised portrait and used the works of Julian Opie for our inspiration. This week I have been working on my planning for the next session, in which we will be interpretting our original 2D portraits into 3D.
I needed a low cost material we could use, that would be highly tactile and easy to manipulate for our less physically able students, yet could allow the high ability students to create a detailed and ‘finished’ looking piece of 3D art.
I have used Salt Dough many a time before with Primary School students and thought it would be worth a try, but with different objectives in mind on this occasion I needed to have a test run first. I was pretty pleased with the results.
The key seems to be to bake the creations for several hours at a very low heat and to use layers of Acrylic paints once the pieces are stone cold. Now I’m looking forward to seeing how the students get on later in the week. We will be initially be measuring ingredients, mixing the dough, and finally creating our portraits and will paint the finished pieces the following week.
