Cover Image: 3-D printed mixed media artwork by 12th Grade Student
What would you create if you only had one word as your inspiration? The Art Exploration class was given an opportunity to look through old encyclopedias and choose a single page as the foundation of their artwork. High school students today have never known life without the internet so referencing an encyclopedia for information or inspiration might seem irrelevant or obsolete.
Encyclopedias are remnants of history from the earliest fragments over 2,000 years ago to the printed volumes that have outdated our libraries and been converted to their digital counterparts. A set of volumes was once revered for their all-encompassing reference of everything in the world that could be found with browsing from one page to the next. The encyclopedia was a companion to the general knowledge and history of countless topics as a starting point for research.
Information in these books reflect the styles of their time and is fixed in print, outdated in a world that continues to progress. Yet there is also a beauty to the old books that embrace a nostalgic sense of discovery as my students flipped through the pages until an image, diagram, or list of definitions caught their artistic eye. Instead of disposing of the unused encyclopedias, my students each sourced a page to repurpose.
"Planes" by 11th Grade Student
Students had their choice of dry media to balance the space of their page that reflected the word they chose to represent. They could identify with any word or topic they found on the page and illustrate into a work of art. Students learned about the art genre of illustration and how to portray a message inspired by text in their artwork.
These illustrations bring new life to the pages of history with each student's personal interpretation of informational text.
"Tape Recorder" by 11th Grade Student
My favorite part of this artwork are the lyrics that I put into the drawing. I picked this page because I randomly found it and thought it was interesting. I also learned more about tape recorders while creating this artwork so I outlined interesting things on the encyclopedia page as I added some lyrics to the music coming from the tape.
My piece is inspired from the word ‘Nymph’. I drew a nereid, the protector of the Mediterranean sea.
"Queen" by 10th Grade Student
My encyclopedia illustration is of the word "Queen." I drew a crown and bees to represent the queen bee with all of her bees busily swarming the honeycomb as they make the honey together.
"Sturgeon" by 9th Grade Student
I chose to draw a sturgeon fish swimming on the lake bottom because they're bottom feeders and I love fishing.
"Automobile" by 11th Grade Student
I chose the automobile page from my encyclopedia and was inspired by the Porsche 912 model.
"Oregon Trail" by 10th Grade Student
This piece is inspired by the early days of the Oregon Trail and the retro video game.
"Heliograph" by 10th Grade Student
I chose the word helicopter because I decided to draw the first word that I found on the page. I represented this word by drawing a collage of different helicopters and titled the piece "Heliograph" as the image on the bottom right describes with the U.S. Army operating the heliograph instruments.
"The Constellations" by 9th Grade Student
I like looking at stars so I experimented with layering oil pastel on the page to scratch out stars. I really liked making all the constellations in pen in the smeared border.
"Weeds" by 12th Grade Student
My artwork shows weeds of different types that you might find in the yard or the woods. I thought of dandelions and vines that seem to be everywhere and used different materials such as colored pencil and fine tip sharpie marker to cover the page. After a couple mistrials and problem solving, I loved how it turned out.
"Apollo 11" by 9th Grade Student
This page was about Space Age discoveries and solar research. I was inspired to draw the Apollo 11. I learned to use pen hatching to create darker shading and less marks to make lighter shading.
The variety of topics chosen by my students reflects the depth of information discovered in the pages of their repurposed encyclopedias. This challenge gave students the freedom to explore a topic and represent it in an innovative way. A piece that truly surprised me was the result of a student putting in the extra effort when they asked me, "Does this artwork have to be 2D?" I asked them to tell me what they were thinking before giving him the go-ahead to take the project into another dimension.
This student incorporated research from his senior presentation to include a miniature house with hexagon windows that he 3D printed outside of class. The home is connected to his mixed-media drawing with a 3D printer actively adding layers one row at a time. Highlighted words on the page and drawings bring the process to life in a symbiotic relationship of machines and humans. However, this work is best explained in detail from the artist's own words:
"Another Layer of Innovation: 3D-Printing Houses" by 12th Grade Student
About the Topic:
The rapidly rising industry of 3D-printing buildings is likely to soon revolutionize the construction industry, significantly reducing building time and costs while expeditiously providing customizable, affordable, durable, energy-efficient, and environmentally-friendly homes for everyone, from the wealthy and luxurious to the poor and the homeless. This new industry will push the limits of material science and robotic engineering, enabling the possibility of settlements on other worlds while also rapidly working to solve the exigent world housing crisis. This art piece made primarily from recycled encyclopedia pages seeks to emphasise this new innovation, prompting its viewers to ponder the various benefits and the ways in which 3D-printing houses may change the world for the better.
About the Art:
The three-dimensional aspect of this art piece demonstrates the startling difference between typical printers making two-dimensional things like encyclopedia pages and 3D-printers creating massive structures by extruding a material layer by layer. The miniature house was actually constructed with a small 3D-printer, being printed layer by layer from the bio-based material known as "polylactic acid", or PLA. Inside the originally designed house are staircases, furniture, and separated rooms with rounded doorways. The hexagonal windows, built-in furniture, and rounded corners establish the idea that 3D-printing houses allows for much more creativity in the design process, making simple what would often be impossible for traditional construction methods to create.
The images made with sharpie in the elevated sector represent the driving forces that are key to this innovation: circuitry, computer-aided design (or CAD), creative interior design, and, of course, the simple yet ineffable inspiration of a home. Such things are the foundation of 3D-printed houses, as literally depicted in this art piece. The trees and lake in the background place a focus on the potential sustainability found in 3D-printing houses, as the process is far more efficient and the materials can be much less harmful to the environment when compared to modern construction methods and materials. Spanning the sides of the elevated encyclopedia, though not shown in a mere two-dimensional image, are more words from the recycled encyclopedia, strongly pertaining to the topic. This includes employment opportunities, architecture, and physics.
Finally, the coloured drawing in the upper-right, intentionally located in the description of the word "efficiency" in the encyclopedia, composes a close-up view of the process of printing a house, with uncoloured contours fading into the distance to convey the message that this art piece can never do such an impressive topic justice, that it can never fully cover everything there is to say about this remarkable innovation, and that it can only describe a fragment of all there is to say and to ponder.
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