Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Magic Art

At first all you see is a contour line drawing. Pull the tab and it magically appears in color! How do they do it?!
Materials: 
- Tagboard (mine was 8" x 36"), one per child
- Scissors
- Ruler
- Page Protectors
- One 8" x 12" Piece of Drawing Paper for each child
- Markers/ Colored Pencils
- Gluestick or Tape
- Permanent Marker

1. On 8" x 12" paper draw a design. May go vertically or horizontally. Do not color in yet!

2. When finished, place into page protector and trace image onto plastic. The paper does not fit entirely inside the page protector, but that's okay. 

3. Take drawing back out and color. When finished place back in page protector and trim so that protector is the same width of your drawing (8"). Do NOT trim off the part of the drawing that does not fit inside the protector.
4. There should be an opening on two sides of your protector. We need three all together. Cut along the fold of protector that is 11" (the longer side). It should open up as if it was the cover of a book for your drawing. 

5. Glue the back of your drawing or tape to the blank side of your page protector so that it does not move on you. Make sure the line drawing matches up with your colored drawing when gluing or taping. 

6. Take 8" x 36" tagboard and divide into three equal sections. You should have three 8" x 12" rectangles. (Teaching students how to use a ruler is always a measure of patience, but is such a good lesson to practice!)
It's hard to see the pencil marks, but there are lines dividing the sections.

7. Fold along the lines.

8.  Fold so that the top layer folds from the left side, like the cover of a book (unlike the image above). If it is opening the opposite way a book would open, it is backwards and upside down. 

9. Take ruler and place along edge and trace so that you have a margin the width of a ruler. Repeat on all four sides so that you have a frame. 




10. Poke a hole in the center rectangle (you can teach the fold and slit method) and cut towards the lines to make a frame. Cut a semi-circle on the bottom.

It should look like this when opened:

12. The center rectangle above will be the back of your frame. Above that center, place your colored drawing on top. 
13. Fold the right flap over your colored drawing.

14. Place contour-line-drawing-page-protector-plastic (whew!) on top of blank flap. 

15. Fold frame over line drawing.

16. I secured the frames down with clear tape.

17. While holding on to JUST the very back page of tagboard (that initial center rectangle in step 12), pull down from the tab and view the magic!


  



**
If I were to do this again, I would make the frame more similar to these dimensions: 10"x 24" (3 10"x8" panels), as seen below:

6 comments:

  1. What fun! I bet the kids loved that magic...

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  2. This is so cool. I will have to try it a few times to get so I understand the system. One challenge - the 8x36" tag - that means you muist be buying the really big stuff and cutting it by hand? Too big to fit in my paper-cutter. I don't usually have tag that large, so maybe I'll have to try to "size it down" to try this.

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  3. I did buy the big stuff, and actually had to fold it in half so that I could cut it in thirds using a paper cutter.

    After doing this, however, I would suggest using a size maybe like... 10" x 24"? (Three 10" x 8" panels) The steps would be all the same, but instead of your frame looking horizontal in the end, it will look vertical.

    I realized this is much better because when you slide out the image, because the page protector isn't the same size as our drawings, it's sometimes tricky to slide back in. Using a 10" x 8" drawing, the sides of the frame are longer and provide more support.

    I hope that makes sense. I was going to make that note in the blog... but figured that might be really hard to visualize without the images.

    We got our FIRST snow day today, ya hoo!! So tomorrow, I will prep a piece of tagboard and post so that you can see what I mean.. hopefully it'll help!

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  4. Thank you! I have been searching for this project for like 10 minutes now, and found it on your site. I did this in elementary school and now I want to do it for the nature center I work for. I'm thinking of using it to show metamorphosis. The traced part will be an egg or tadpole, and the colored part will include extra lines so it looks like the adult. I need to play around with it, but now I know how to make it and the frame! I knew someone else had to have done this before!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Thank you! I have been searching for this project for like 10 minutes now, and found it on your site. I did this in elementary school and now I want to do it for the nature center I work for. I'm thinking of using it to show metamorphosis. The traced part will be an egg or tadpole, and the colored part will include extra lines so it looks like the adult. I need to play around with it, but now I know how to make it and the frame! I knew someone else had to have done this before!

    ReplyDelete
  6. where can i find tagboard that is 8x36

    ReplyDelete