Paula Scher inspired California Printmaking - Fourth Grade

Paula Scher is a currently practicing painter who recently showed her work at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, CA. Needless to say her style proves one fact: She loves maps.

I had fin showing her work to the class because I feel it helped the students see a map in a completely different light. Rather than simple forms with different colors, Paula Scher dives deep into the world inside the region, state or country. Using a fine paint brush, she writes many different villages, towns, cities, waterways, bodies of water, countries into the map, cramming as much information into the space as possible. Using colorful lines to help direct your eyes into specific sections of the paintings, you get the feeling as if you too are travelling all around the maps.

 For more on Paula Scher, you can visit her website by clicking HERE

New York City's 5 Boroughs 

 

 

India

 

  

 Manhattan, New York

 

 The world

 

This lesson incorporates many different forms of media and techniques. 

The California Standards for Visual Arts Fourth Grade, states that students should learn about California's contribution to the arts and also general studies of the State of California. 

I wanted to first have the students understand the form of the state of California on a map. We looked at the different regions and temperate zones of California and what the location of California meant to the rest of the country.

Students traced the form of California with black and blue pens onto styrofoam plates that can be purchased at your local art supply. 

The second step is to add a colorful background to the surface that you are printing on. Using oil pastels, students blended various colors together and created lines that mimicked the lines Paula Scher used in her paintings. 

Finally, our classroom was turned into a printmaker's studio, using real printing ink and brayers to coat the print surface, students learn the basic techniques to accomplishing a true print.

Extension: Use colored pencil and detailed maps of California and have the students write in the various regions, neighborhoods, towns, cities of California along the colorful oil pastel lines.

 

Here are the products of some of the student's work.