Think back, way back, to your elementary-school art class. You and your mom may have thought the Crayola hand-turkey drawing and macaroni picture frame you made were swell, but the times, they have a-changed. Today, a bunch of Seattle first graders has you beat.
The framed artwork above is a group collage composed of sixteen lovely individual Mixel collages created by six and seven year olds at John Hay Elementary School.
Impressed? We are.
The kids did have some guidance from parent volunteer Miriam Marcus, who thought of using Mixel for her son’s class submission to the school’s annual art auction. Each classroom makes one piece, and they typically sell for hundreds of dollars.
When we asked Miriam why she chose our app, she said, “I thought Mixel would be fun for the kids who love technology, and be a way that they could create their own unique compositions yet maintain a consistent palette of shapes and colors to achieve a cohesive end result.”
To begin the project, Miriam first created a small number of simple geometric pieces—colored squares, rectangles, and circles—and arranged them in a starting mixel using our new feature, Private Threads. Private threads can be especially useful for kids’ projects like this, or any collaboration not yet ready to be shared with the world.
After showing the first graders the basics like deleting, copying, and resizing, she let them run free. Playing and creating came naturally to them. “Once we showed them how Mixel worked,” Miriam said, “every kid jumped in—not a single one asked if they were doing it right or said they didn’t know what to do.”
After each student created a mixel, Miriam used Mixel’s Snapshot feature to export it to her photo album. The mixels were then arranged into a grid, printed on fine art paper, and professionally matted and framed. The final work, titled Re-Mix (2012), cost $140—$100 for the layout and print, and $40 for the 24” x 36” frame. Miriam got generous price discounts when the printer and framer learned that Re-Mix was made for a school art auction.
And that’s how a meta-collage by first graders was born. It will be up for auction at the school’s benefit this Saturday, so interested buyers from the Mixelverse should grab their last-minute flights to Seattle now.
We hope the Hay Elementary project and Private Threads will inspire you to help kids make art together, raise funds for your own group, or maybe just re-inspire your first-grade self. Go ahead—now you can finally mixel that postmodern hand-turkey series you’ve been seeing in your dreams.
