Faux Mosaic

Once again I was challenged with finding a use for obsolete materials. My husband came home with a box full of advertising fliers from work, so I got to work coming up with a new project. I am also scheduled to teach at Art Week at a local elementary school and needed one more project to add to the week, so the faux mosaic frames with portraits was born.

The frames are made out of cardboard, painted with acrylic paint. I cut the advertising into 1/2 inch squares and had my kids patiently glue the squares onto the frame to look like a mosaic. Once the pieces were glued in place we covered the frames with glossy Mod Podge. I took a profile picture of each of the kids with my digital camera, then traced their profiles directly from the computer screen. Since the profile pictures were pretty small, I chose to cut them out instead of asking the kids to do this. It takes a pretty steady hand to cut the profiles out so that they look like the child you photographed.

I am looking forward to trying this project with 60 kids next month during Art Week. I asked two neighbor kids to come and try this project with my kids so that I could get a feel for how long it would take them to complete the project and I wanted to see the results from a range of ages. The photos I have posted are from a kindergartner, 2nd and 3rd grader.