Studio: Fibers – Woven Paintings with Allison Krook

Video Transcript

The next lesson that I’m going to show you today is a painted paper weaving. The first thing your students are going to need to do to create a painted paper weaving is create one or two paintings. Here’s one painting that I did. I’ve already cut this piece of paper into a loom, but you can see the painting that we created first. If you’d like you can have two paintings to create a woven loom weaving that looks like this, where there’s two paintings woven together, or you could create a weaving using one painting and a solid color piece of construction paper.

The first thing you’ll need to do is create your basic paper loom. Just like before, you’re going to fold your paper in half. This time, students can do the work. They’ll need a ruler, pencil, scissors and glue. The first thing they’ll need to do is draw a line across the top of the paper. Remember, the top of the paper is the opening of the piece of paper. I’m using a white colored pencil here, so that you guys can see the lines that I’m drawing, but if students are working above their own paper they should definitely be able to see the lines that they’re drawing.

Turn your ruler perpendicular to the top line, or the name line. Have students draw lines going from one side to the next. I normally don’t have students measure each line. I just use the width of the ruler and slide it along until I get to the end.

The next step will be to have students cut the lines leading up to the top. You can open your loom and flatten it out.

The next step is going to be to take your painting and on the backside, the white side, use your ruler to draw vertical lines all the way across the back of the painting. Students should be able to cut their painting into lots of different strips. Before they begin weaving, you might have students line their paper up so that their painting fits together again, or students might choose to mix all of their painted strips up to create a wacky weaving.

I think this looks good. Go ahead and begin weaving your painted paper through your loom. Make sure to have students push their strips of paper as close together as possible to keep the weave nice and tight.

This is what it looks like against a contrasting black sheet of paper, but if you wanted to you could take your second painted paper and you could weave those strips through your woven piece of paper. What I really like about this lesson is that you can incorporate color theory. You could have students paint using cool colors and warm colors. You could have students create monochromatic paintings. Whatever content you’re choosing to teach at that moment, you could use to create a weaving.

When you’re finished weaving, remember to glue all of the edges on both sides of your weaving.

Here are two finished examples of weaving with painted paper. The next weaving that I’m going to be showing you is going to be a weaving that’s similar in style using the basic paper loom technique, but we’re going to use some wacky lines this time.