Our Big Art Project: Still Life with Ukelele

For much of Terms 2 and 3 our class was busy creating an artwork which was quite complicated. First we had to make a 3-d ukelele out of cardboard...

We had to work collaboratively to be successful. Here are the steps we had to follow...

First, we taped the sides to the top and bottom of the cardboard ukelele shape. This created the sides and made the ukelele look 3-dimensional.

Next, we added tape to the top layer:

 And then put on strips of white A4 paper that we sliced off with a ruler. We did this to get a really sharp edge rather than soft, ragged edge. We used slightly watered down PVA glue to glue the paper down onto the cardboard.

 The paper machied ukeleles dry outside the classroom...

Next, we painted the cardboard 3-d ukelele shape. We use house paint as it was better at covering the cardboard, and the colours were much better than the acrylic paints we had.

While we worked on our ukeleles we sketched lots of vases and flowers for our final painting. The teacher bought some canvases for the class so parents wouldn't have to pay to have the finished artwork  framed.



The Painting Phase:
We used yellow chalk to transfer the vase and flower designs to the canvas. We worked ont he under-painting of the flowers and the background.

When this had dried we put more details in our flowers and vase and once dried we did some final details using a sgraffito technique.

Finally we finished our painted canvases. 

The next step was to put the neck and final details on to the painted ukeleles. This had to be done by the teacher as the washer and button details were very small and hot glue came though the holes and had to be handled carefully! The string details were also put on carefully with a silver and gold pen to give an optical illusion of strings.

Then, a glue gun was used to glue the ukeleles on to the canvas with the still-life painting of a vase and flowers.

This project took two terms to complete but we were very happy with the realistic ukeleles we created! We certainly persevered...

We showed our paintings at our school Art exhibition at the end of Term 3 and we were very proud.

We think we will never forget our year of learning the ukelele. Our paintings will remind us of the fun we had!