Silly Sneakers.

Drawing one's shoe has always been a fun, worthwhile activity for my fifth grade students. The shoe is a very personal item and it gives kids the incentive to take their drawing seriously and to pay abiding attention to the complex details that today's new-fangled shoes demand.

As a follow-up to this intense drawing activity, a lighthearted project seemed in order. I asked the students to dig through their closets and find an old shoe that was destined for the trash bin. The following week all sorts of footwear were brought in--baby shoes, high-heels, wing-tips, sandals, and sneakers of all types. Then the fun began.

I presented the students with my trunk loads of accumulated stuff, odds and ends, bits and pieces, knick-knacks, scraps, and remnants of just about everything--junk to most folks, but a treasure trove for artists.

Personifying the Shoe

The objective was to create shoes with personalities, to transform them into something, well, very unshoelike. So, armed with warm glue guns and cool ideas, the students went to work, rummaging here, juxtaposing there, gluing, cutting, painting, yanking, stuffing, and contemplating a myriad of decisions and possibilities.

The results covered the gamut: a mafioso gangster made from a black dress shoe, Pippi Longstocking with orange braided yarn for hair, a "scared guy" with bulging styrofoam eyes, a "zapped" electrician with pipecleaner hair zigzagging from his head. Students had fun figuring out what to do with the shoe's tongue, some using it as a nose and others making it, literally, a tongue.

Some students found the character of their shoes better expressed with the addition of oaktag hands, as with the nurse wielding a hypodermic needle and the mad scientist fumbling with his bubbling test tubes.

Humor As Inspiration

One of the basic tasks in the creative process is to bring together ideas which are remote from each other. Picasso once said, "You should be able to pick up a piece of wood and find you have a bird in your hand." (Or for that matter, discover a goofy character in the worn features of an old shoe.) Humor is often an important factor (as in Picasso's Bull Head, made of bicycle seat and handlebars, or his Baboon with a Volkswagen automobile for a head), but it never trivializes the art. Indeed, it is often humor that inspires the student in the found-object art project. The outcome can be silly, but the creative process is serious business.

NATIONAL STANDARD

Students intentionally take advantage of the qualities and characteristics of art media, techniques, and processes to enhance communication of their experiences and ideas.

Ted Barlag is an art teacher at the Saudi Arabian International School in Riyadhl, Saudi Arabia.