The Joy of Trying Something New (Ep. 456)

Welcome to Art Ed Radio, the podcast for our teachers. This show is produced by The Art of Education, and I’m your host, Tim Bogatz. I want to talk today and just do a quick episode today on why it’s important for us to try new things as teachers. And obviously there are a ton of different directions that can go, but I want to talk today about different types of art making and the benefits that come with trying new things because I would say that trying a new medium and continually trying new things with art making is vital for art teachers and not just for our personal growth, but also for the benefit of our students. As artists and I guess as teachers too, it’s really easy for us to fall into the comfort of techniques and types of creating that are familiar to us.

But honestly, when you’re pushing yourself to explore something new, that can really reignite that passion for creating. So we’ll talk about all kinds of different ways to do that today. But whether you’re experimenting with alcohol inks, for example, or diving into a new digital platform, I think that trying a new medium can give you some fresh ideas. It can give you some different types of results, and the entire process can lead to a lot of learning opportunities. And the exploration that you’re doing doesn’t just expand your skill set, it’s also going to allow you to experience what your students experience. That vulnerability and that excitement that comes with trying something new for the first time. And it’s good for us to kind of step back into that role as a learner.

And if you can do that, you can model the importance of growth and adaptability. So whether you are just talking about what you’ve learned with your students or you’re doing something new and doing it live alongside your students, you’re modeling something really important there. Bringing new mediums into your classroom can honestly transform your learning environment. When students see you as a teacher have genuine excitement about a new technique, they’re more likely to be curious, they’re more likely to be engaged. I’m not promising anything, I’m not guaranteeing anything because I think we all know that curiosity and engagement are in short supply these days. But introducing a new medium or a fresh medium can help students discover some of their own preferences and their own talents.

Not everyone is going to thrive with realistic drawing or traditional painting. Some kids are going to find their voice in sculpture or printmaking or doing something digital. But if you are offering students a range of experience, a range of mediums and offering them new things, you’re teaching something more than just the art techniques. You’re helping students find the creative outlets that are going to resonate with them and the work that comes from that. The work that comes after that is going to be so much better for them. They’re going to be so much more involved in what they want to do. And I would also say that when you’re experimenting with new media, you’re also encouraging collaboration. You’re encouraging problem-solving.

As students learn alongside each other, every classroom is filled with students who learn differently. And if you have a lot of different mediums, if you’re trying new mediums, that gives multiple opportunities for kids to shine. And because if you have a student who struggles with their fine motor skills or struggles with drawing, and they might excel at doing big abstract painting. Or kids who are comfortable with clay might also notice similarities in processes and techniques and they want to do needle felting. And I think if you can open up those opportunities for them, if you can try out those techniques yourself first, then you’re able to have the knowledge you need to guide your students to troubleshoot the challenges with them, and you can kind of tailor the learning and the experiences to meet their needs.

And so trying those new things is a great way for you to again, provide those opportunities, but also stay inspired yourself and stay connected to your own creativity because it’s going to keep art making exciting, it’s going to keep teaching exciting. And if you are excited, that feeling is going to show through in your classroom. So I want to talk today about some different ideas, different mediums that you might want to try and share with you where you can find some resources. And we will link to as much as we can in the show notes today. So whatever sort of captures your interest, you can dive in a little bit deeper. Now, if I list five or six ideas, do you think you should try all five or six? No.

We are all aware that nobody has time for that, but I am hoping that maybe one or two ideas will pique your interest, like I said, and that you might think they are worth exploring. So number one, I talked earlier, mentioned earlier, alcohol inks, and I love the idea of drawing with alcohol inks. It’s a great medium. It creates these really vibrant and flowing and unpredictable effects. You can’t be precise. You got to let it flow a little bit. You have to have a little bit of chance and you’ll learn how things work but you can’t be a perfectionist. You’ve got to let go just a little bit. And I think they’re really good for experimenting with color blending and getting different textures. And they’re also really fun because they dry so quickly. And so it works really well for just short projects, just a day of experimenting.

Or you can do some really cool layered techniques because they do dry so quickly. And so there’s a lot you can do with those abstract pieces for sure. You can dive into your sketchbook, create some amazing backgrounds if you want to do more layering things. I’ve gotten tiles from Home Depot before, and you can do anything with alcohol inks on tiles or decorative coasters, a lot of opportunities there. And you can do so many cool designs that just have this very fluid quality. You can get great use of color, they can be a lot of fun, dare I say, whimsical. I don’t know. There’s a lot you can do with those, which are really cool. And one really good resource that we have, Katelyn Thompson, a few years back, created a now conference video that’s all about working with alcohol inks or experimenting with alcohol inks.

And that is a great place for you to get started. So we’ll link to that and give you an opportunity there. Number two, gel printing or mono printing with a gel plate. I love jelly plates. They are super accessible, super easy for beginners to use whether you teach elementary school, high school, anything in between. Kids really enjoy working with gel plates, offers so many possibilities for layering and texturing, and it really allows you to explore color and shape and pattern. Again, no matter what age you are working with, there are so many techniques, so many cool things that you can do with them. They can stand alone as prints. People love doing nature inspired prints. You can use leaves or feathers or stencils, anything like that.

If you want to do mixed media stuff, jelly plates work great. You can do backgrounds for collages or journals. You can make pattern prints for wrapping paper or fabric. So many different opportunities of what you can do with those. There’s also a great article that I will link to by Mariana VanDerMolen, it’s called Five Remarkable Gel Plate Printing Techniques. And there’s a lot of really, really good stuff in there. So she has ideas about printing with unconventional objects and creating image transfers and doing resists. There’s so many cool things that you can do, and she gives examples of artists that you can check out. And so if you really want to dive a little bit deeper into that, that article will give you a great place to get started.

So we’ll make sure that we link to that for you as well. All right. Idea number three is cyanotypes or printing with the sun. Now, as this episode is being released, there’s not a lot of sun out there where I am, but you can save this for when it is actually a nice day. But doing prints with the sun, creating those cyanotypes is a very, very cool process because it allows for so many different things that you can do and creates these just really striking images. They’re blue and white, which is a very unique way to see things and to get some interesting results. And it really doesn’t take much to dive into that. And if you’re bringing that to your classroom, it’s getting kids outdoors, which is great. Just anytime you can get outside, connect a little bit with nature, that’s an amazing thing for ourselves but even more so for our students.

They’re super excited anytime you can offer them that opportunity. And it’s a great combination of art and science. I spoke earlier about making kids curious or sort of piquing their curiosity and this is something that can do that a lot. And so again, going back to the idea of connecting with nature, you can create botanical prints with flowers and leaves and ferns. You can do abstract compositions with your cyanotypes with found objects, or you can even cut out your own shapes and create all sorts of cool compositions. And you can do photo-based prints using transparencies, but get that cyanotype look for it. And there’s a lot of great opportunities there. So Kristina Brown has a great article called How to Teach Cyanotypes in the K-12 Classroom.

And again, you can create these cyanotypes without a dark room, and it’s something that kids of just about any age can do. So if you’re interested in cyanotypes, again, that article is great. She talks about the history and some great artists that you can share, and then different methods that you can do with step-by-step techniques. So whether you’re trying to do toning or multiple exposures or even cyanotypes on fabric or hand-coloring the images. There’s so many things you can do. And Kristina offers you a guide on how to do that. So if you want to dive in there, we will link to that article as well. All right, number four is caustic painting. It’s basically painting with wax or wax based art. It’s a great style of painting. It took me forever to try.

I think I was in my late thirties before I tried caustics, but I love them and it’s a great way of working that adds this sort of tactile layered quality to your artwork. The experimentation with caustics is not only figuring out how to do it, but then thinking about how you can carve and layer and embed objects. There’s so many different things you can do, and the finishes are so unique, they’re luminous almost. I love seeing the finished results with wax, and you can do a lot with that. My favorite is to do just abstract paintings with a ton of different textures, but you can take that into mixed-media pieces, whether you can embed things with photographs or found objects. You can do landscape paintings, and they just have this very soft, very sort of atmospheric feel.

And I think just getting into the process is such a wonderful thing when it comes to caustics. And honestly, my inspiration for that was Lena Rodriguez. She’s been on the podcast a ton, so you probably know her. But there is a PRO Pack from Lena all about getting started with caustics where she talks about techniques and processes and gives you a great overview on everything that you can do with that. So if you’re a PRO member, that is definitely worth checking out. Now, number five, I mentioned this earlier, but needle felting. And this is not something that I’ve done a ton of, but it’s something I’ve experimented with a little bit and would like to do a little bit more.

And so felting is a great way to kind of bring fibers into your classroom and bring a sculptural element into your fibers work depending on where you are with that. And I think just introducing that a three-dimensional medium gives such great tactile engagement. That’s something you love, something your students love. It’s a great thing to check out. I find it super relaxing just because of the repetitive nature of the process. I do a lot of drawings like that, and I see a lot of similarities with the types of drawings I like to do. And doing that felting with that repetitive nature. And you create these really small, really detailed, really cool projects. There’s a lot you can do with that. And they can be whatever you would them like to be.

A lot of people love just starting with animals and doing little 3D sculptures of animals, but you can do texture landscapes, you can do wall hangings. A lot of people like to do embellishments for their clothes or create different accessories, so many different opportunities. And again, we have a ton of resources on doing felting or bringing it into your classroom. There is a Discovering Felting Collection in the FLEX Curriculum. There’s a needle felting basics in pack and PRO learning. So if you’re a member of those great resources there. And there are two episodes of the Everyday Art Room podcasts that talk about needle felting. So we will link to those as well.

Now, just a couple other ideas that I kind of like that I think are worth checking out if you’re looking for something new, doing reduction prints. There’s a great presentation at the recent NOW Conference earlier this month from Melinda Moen and Wendy Kubiak on doing reduction prints and how to do that. So you can check out the After Pass and see that video if that’s something that is of interest to you. And there’s an article published, I think just yesterday from Aubrey DiDonato that’s all about reduction prints, a step-by-step guide on how to create those. So if you came to NOW check out the After Pass. If you did not, check out that article. It’ll give you a great idea on how to do reduction prints with your students.

And also from Aubrey DiDonato, she’s got a great article on tin foil lithography, which is a fun and kind of alternative way to create that printmaking process. And you can keep an eye out for another article in March for some creative lithography examples from Aubrey as well. So a lot of cool things that can sort of get you started with that experimentation. So a lot of different ideas there, a lot of good examples and all of them are leading back to that idea of experimentation and that idea of trying something new. And when you are experimenting, when you’re trying something new, that is going to, I hope, bring you some joy. And that’s a theme that we’ve seen in some of the articles that we’ve published recently too as well.

So two other ones that I think are worth reading. Jessica Westman, it was published just a couple of weeks ago, and it’s called Art Teachers in Action and Stereotypes and the Joy of Creative Play. And so she talks about different art teacher stereotypes. You can see if you fit in with one or maybe more of them, but then talking about how they play with, whether that be DIY projects or upgrading your art room or different ways to experiment with color and painting and play, or different ways to create characters or cartoons, all sorts of different ideas. But definitely check that out. And I think it’s a good idea of thinking about where we, and about where some of our other teachers, some of our colleagues find joy as well.

And then there’s an article from Kyle Wood, I think it’s going to publish tomorrow. It’s called 10 Fun Ways to Spark Joy and Fall in Love with Art All Over Again. And so he talks about how teaching art is obviously incredibly rewarding, but you have your own artistic needs as well. And so he talks about how you can rekindle your love for art, just doing an art history date night or doing explorations or doing different things with your classroom or creating your own art or doing things with your friends. So many different artistic endeavors that you can kind of dive into that will kind of spark joy for you and hopefully rekindle some of your love for art. And I think that’s kind of a message that we need right now.

Teaching at the end of February is really difficult, and so if we can find ways to try new things and find ways to spark joy in ourselves, I think that’s going to be worthwhile. So just a couple final thoughts. I would say that we have too much to do as our teachers. The demands feel like they can be endless. We need to come up with creative instruction. We need to do all of the administrative tasks, we need to answer all of the emails, fill out all of the paperwork. And on top of that, we are giving so much to our students. And all of those things combined can really lead to us feeling overwhelmed, but infusing more joy, what we’ve been talking about today, finding that joy can help restore your energy. It can help restore your creativity.

And when those are restored, you can be more present and engaged with your students, but also more engaged and more present in our own lives. Because when we cultivate joy, we are better as people. That makes us better as teachers. That joy helps us recharge and reconnect with our own passions with the things that we love, and that’s going to make us more balanced. That’s going to make us more resilient in the long run because ultimately, joy can be a catalyst for us finding more personal growth and also professional fulfillment. And those two things are going to help us thrive as our teachers. So whether you’re finding joy in experimenting and trying new things like I talked about today, or finding joy in other ways, I hope you can continue to do that, and I hope you can use that for your students and more importantly, for yourself.

Art Ed Radio is produced by The Art of Education with audio engineering from Michael Crockett. Thank you as always for listening to the show. If you’re loving the podcast, please leave us a five-star review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. We appreciate the ratings, we read all of the reviews, and we are taking questions for the mailbag with Amanda that’s going to publish next week. Email podcasts@theartofeducation.edu or timothybogatz@theartofeducation.edu with any questions you may have. We are looking forward to reading those as well.