Invader Paper Mosaic

This has been a long project for second grade so I am going to break it down into two blog posts, the second of which I will post next week.

2nd grade has been learning about the French street artist, Invader. Invader is an anonymous artist who uses small bathroom tiles to create mosaics of 8-bit video game characters. He is named after the old arcade game Space Invaders and is most well-known for portraying these in his street art. However, he has moved on to incorporate other video game characters such as Mario and Pac-Man. He likes to display his "invasions" in busy areas of cities due to their high traffic. He believes that everyone should be able to enjoy art, not just people who can afford to go to museums and galleries.

I wanna be sure to stress, like our Keith Haring project, I did not condone street art. While I love it, I made sure to point out to students that this form of art is illegal and they would get in a lot of trouble if they tried it.

The first day and a half was spent looking at characters from the Space Invaders. We talked about how all the characters are symmetrical and made up of pixels (or small squares). We used gridded paper to re-create Space Invader characters. I wanted them to have a good understanding of how the Space Invaders were symmetrical before moving on to making their own.

After a couple classes of re-creating old space invaders, students finally had the opportunity to create several of their own. My requirements were  that it had to have an eye, be symmetrical, and it had to be 8 pixels high and 8 pixels wide. These requirements were to help the students with keeping their invader symmetrical.

After a few days of gridded drawings of invaders, we chose our favorite invader that we had created and made a paper mosaic out of it. Throughout the project, we had discussed what a mosaic was. I used a die-cutter to create the squares for the paper mosaics so all of the colors are the same. This part of the project was done more so as a way to show me that they were ready to move on to the final stage of the unit: creating a clay invader. But we will save that for the next blog post!