Ink Blot Illustrations Inspired by Stefan Bucher

     After seeing this blog post over at A Faithful Attempt I was inspired to try this awesome process with my fourth graders at Suffield.  At A Faithful Attempt, the project was done with 8th and 9th graders, but I thought I could probably adapt it for younger kids, and it really went great and the kids really liked it.

     To start, we studied the ink blot illustrations of Stefan Bucher.  We looked at his blog where he posted a new ink blot illustration video clip everyday for 100 days.  He started each illustration with a blown ink blot, and then figured out how to turn the abstract blot into an understandable creature.

     We gave the exact same process a try.  We first put India Ink on our papers with brushes, and then used drinking straws to blow the ink around.  (We used paper that someone donated a few years ago that is really shiny.  This made the ink more able to slide around than it would on drawing or construction paper.)  When the ink the was dry we used permanent markers to transform them into understandable illustrations.  We also used watercolors and regular markers to add some color.  We tried to still keep lots of prominent white space like Bucher though.  The students had the option to add titles that could provide more information for viewers.  We talked about text in artwork and lettering for this.  I was really happy with the results!