Recently, you may have noticed tape being incorporated into everything from fashion design to home decor. While enjoying a new level of respectability, tape has moved out of the workshop and into the studio with a palette of bright colors to choose from. As an alternative art medium, students of all ages will find it quick, fun and quirky enough to be exciting. It's goof-proof - if an area is unsatisfactory, either peel it off and start over or cover it with more tape. This simple lesson plan encourages students to create patterns by overlapping and defining lines on a canvas panel, and add dimension by incorporating more canvases or objects. A word of caution - once you start sticking, it's hard to stop!

Grade Levels

K–12

Lesson Objectives

• Students will be able to connect an everyday consumable product to visual art and understand how everyday objects can be used to create things of value
• Students will create non-objective art based on the design elements of line, color, balance and movement
• Students will use basic math and geometry skills to develop patterns and spatial relationships

Historical/Cultural Relativity

• Optical Art ("Op" Art) - mathematically-oriented art created to play tricks on visual perception (1950's & '60's)
• Pop Art - art for contemporary consumer culture, explores everyday imagery and materials (1950's & '60's)
• Neo-Plasticism (Mondrian) Subsets art into rectangles (Holland, 1920's - '40s)

Preparation

In order to share a roll of tape in a classroom setting, you might wish to wrap a couple yards tape around pop cans.

Procedure

1. Have students begin with a "base", a canvas panel. Have them select 2-3 smaller stretched canvases or other objects to incorporate into their design and add dimension. (Suggestions: bathroom tissue rolls, small cups, dowels, old CD's, etc.)
2. Apply tape. High school ages may wish to use a hobby knife to create corners and shapes. Younger ages can use scissors to cut the tape, or tear it from the roll.
3. Encourage students to create patterns and to vary the width of their lines by overlapping tapes. Some colors of tape are translucent and students will discover they can create various shades when the colors overlap each other. Very young ages will enjoy just spontaneously laying down colorful tape and should be encouraged to use the tape to make shapes.
4. If desired, a coat of Acrylic Gloss Medium over the surface of the artwork once it's finished will keep the tape in place as edges start to peel up and the adhesive loses it's stickiness over time.

Variations

• Create 3-D sculpture using objects joined together and covered with masking tape. Some plastics, foam and coated items reject adhesive. Cardboard and paper items will not allow tape to be repositioned.
• Using square canvas, have each student design a flat, geometric pattern, then join together for a class "quilt" (see B)
• Have students place a small object on the larger base (for instance, a small canvas on a large canvas panel) and challenge them to make the small object "disappear". It will become a design problem-solving exercise in making something 3-D appear 2-D.
• Just for fun, have students create "wearable" art. For example: purses, wallets, belts from masking tape covered posterboard.

Topics for Discussion

K-4 Creating simple geometric shapes. What shapes can you make with the tape? What shapes can't you make?

5-8 Alternative art materials. Why look for them? How does it change a piece of art? Why is is significant to contemporary culture? Would you have been able to do this art project 50 years ago?

9-12 Geometric shapes and their importance in art. Discuss artists who have made paintings/sculptures about a shape, show examples (Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky, Ellsworth Kelly, Donald Judd).

National Standards

Content Standard #2 — Using knowledge of structures and functions

K-4 Students use visual structures and functions of art to communicate ideas

5-8 Students employ organizational structures and analyze what makes them effective or not effective in the communication of ideas

9-12 Students create artworks that use organizational principles and functions to solve specific visual arts problems

Content Standard #4 — Understanding the visual arts in relation to history and culture

K-4 Students demonstrate how history, culture and the visual arts can influence each other in making and studying works of art

5-8 Students analyze, describe and demonstrate how factors of time and place (such as climate, resources, ideas and technology) influence visual characteristics that give meaning and value to a work of art

9-12 Students analyze relationships of works of art to one another in terms of history, aesthetics and culture, justifying conclusions made in the analysis and using such conclusions to inform their own art making.

Content Standard #6 — Making connections between visual arts and other disciplines

K-4 Students identify connections between the visual arts and other disciplines in the curriculum

5-8 Students describe ways in which the principles and subject matter of other disciplines taught in the school are interrelated with the visual arts

9-12 Students synthesize the creative and analytical principles and techniques of the visual arts and selected other arts disciplines, the humanities or the sciences