Day 1- Artist in Residency: Leni Newell

Banner design plans on graph paper.

This year, the Banks Road Cultural Arts Committee has created a wonderful line-up of artists, musicians, dancers, and writers to come and visit our school. Today was the first of our 5th grade Artist in Residency with Leni Newell. Mrs. Newell has built up quite a portfolio visiting schools around North Carolina to work with the students on creating painted silk banners and batik artwork. We are excited to have Mrs. Newell working with us to create silk banners that will become a permanent piece of artwork for our school lobby.

The creative process of this residency started about a month ago when Mrs. Newell met with a small team of teachers, administrators and parent volunteers to come up with ideas for the location, concept, and composition of our banners. We were inspired by 5th grade's theme for the year, "Oh, the Places You'll Go" by Dr. Seuss, and our Banks Road motto of going out and blazing trails.

After deciding on a theme for our banners, we got to work sketching out ideas for the images. I also asked students of all grade levels to sketch their ideas about going places and blazing trails. We combined my designs with their drawings to create the final designs for the banners.

Mrs. Robertshaw and Mrs. Brugler enlarging our designs.

Finally, today, after all that prep work, we were able to start working on the banners themselves....

But wait, that required even more prep work!!

Our 5th grade teams started their time with Mrs. Newell by talking about what it means to be a professional artist, learning what a portfolio is and discussing the attitude and behaviors required to create artwork that will become a permanent part of our school. Meanwhile, a couple of our wonderful parent volunteers, worked hard to enlarge our designs to the size we would need them for our banners.

Mrs. Newell working with a student to stretch the silk onto the frame.

After the 5th graders' discussion with Mrs. Newell, they started work on assembling frames onto which they began stretching the silk fabric. This helps to hold the silk tight so that our designs will be clean and professional. The kids did a wonderful job working together to push in all of those pins!!

Our very last group of the day, Ms. Johnson's 5th grade class, was able to start tracing their design onto the silk and begin applying the black resist. We'll learn more about this in the days to come. 

Students in Ms. Johnson's class tracing their design onto the silk.

If you would like to volunteer to help during the remainder of our Artist in Residency- Nov. 9, 14, 15 and/or 16- check out our Sign-up Genius at http://www.signupgenius.com/go/10C0445AFA628A46-leni/3466745 or email me at mstephenson@wcpss.net