- Hi everyone.

My name is Lauren and I'm an art teacher with an organization called Art For The Journey.

I wanna welcome you to the Creative Corner where we get to explore and experiment with all kinds of cool stuff from the world of art and creativity.

On today's episode we're gonna talk about BFF's, specifically the many places where the arts and STEM are BFFs.

We often think of scientists as methodical and precise and artists as free-willed, impulsive creators but did you know that some art has science, math and technology packed right into it?

And that artists throughout history have been helping scientists conduct their work?

Today on the Creative Corner, we're going to do some art cooking, make a cactus from scratch and use our mad photography skills to investigate our world.

So come on in, let's get creative.

(upbeat music) You all know that art supplies don't just come from the art studio.

Our first project today is a super hands on one that starts in the kitchen.

You're going to need some flour, some salt, a little bit of water, a couple of measuring cups, a big bowl for mixing and something to stir with like maybe a fork or a whisk.

Eventually you're gonna need either a butter knife or something you can carve some clay with and if you want, you can grab some cookie cutters and things to make cool shapes.

We're gonna make our own salt dough from scratch.

It's a little bit like art cooking because we're gonna use a specific recipe, mix some ingredients together and then end up with a really cool clay that we can sculpt, carve, mold and then dry to have our own little creations.

Go ask a grownup for help gathering your ingredients and let's make some salt dough.

To start your salt dough, the first step is to measure out your ingredients.

You're going to need one cup of flour.

One half cup of salt and when you measure your dry ingredients make sure that you have a nice, smooth edge on the top.

You don't want a big mound of salt or flour.

You went it to be nice and flat.

You get the exact measurements and then we're gonna stir together our dry ingredients to make sure they're nice and combined before we add our water.

We want it to be a nice even mixture where everything is evenly spread out throughout the mix.

That looks good and I've measured out about one half cup of water.

Now we might not use all of this water.

I'm just gonna add it a little bit at a time and mix it in and then mix it more as I need it.

I'm gonna stir with my fork.

My wet ingredients and my dry ingredients are gonna start mixing together to form big clumps.

Making salt dough is a lot like making pancakes or cake batter or cookie dough.

You're combining flour and water, a lot more salt than you want your pancakes to have but it's a very similar process.

I'm gonna go in with my hands and mix this up a little bit more.

Now it's a little bit sticky and a little bit wet, so you're gonna get your hands a little bit messy which I enjoy.

Hopefully you do too but you know, if you don't like getting your hands messy, this would be a great time to invite a buddy to make some artwork with you.

Maybe your buddy wants to get their hands messy.

Now that my dough is sticking together nicely I'm gonna take it out of the bowl.

Knead it with my hands a little bit and you're probably going to get some dough on your table.

So make sure you do this on a surface that's allowed to get messy.

There are different ways to knead dough, as long as you're putting a little bit of pressure on it, squishing it around, stretching it out and then combining it back together.

Although this dough looks a lot like something you could eat, it's got so much salt in it it's really unhealthy to eat, especially for animals.

Gotta make sure that you keep it in a place where nobody's gonna pick it up and try to eat it even though it looks a little bit like a cookie when it's done.

It should feel nice and thick and ready to mold.

There's one last step before we can use it to make our artwork and that is to let it rest.

We've been working hard.

Our doughs been working hard to get the right consistency for us.

So we are going to make sure we get all our little crumbs up from our work surface.

Then we're gonna roll our dough into a nice, neat ball.

Roll it in between your hands until it smooths out.

I'm gonna put my salt dough back in the bowl and I'm gonna let it rest right here on the table for about 20 minutes.

I'll cover it up with a cloth so it doesn't get too dry on the top.

That's gonna make sure that everything in there is nice and combined and mixed together and ready for us to sculpt and carve and make cool things out of.

So I'll see you in fake 20 minutes.

Now that my salt dough has had a nice 20 minute rest, I'm gonna wake it up and use it to make some stuff.

So let's uncover it.

If you touch it, it should feel kind of firm but still a little bit squishy.

It should not feel sticky.

Perfect.

It feels like clay.

I'm gonna move my bowl out of the way a little bit.

I'm gonna take a little piece of my salt dough 'cause I don't need the whole thing yet.

Roll it out into a little ball and then I'm gonna squish it down on my clean work surface.

If you want, you can use something round shaped, kinda like a rolling pin and roll your dough until it's nice and smooth and thin.

If you make your salt dough sculptures really thick, then they won't dry very fast.

They'll take a really long time and they might stay soft inside which might make them more likely to break.

So it's best if you can roll it out to about a quarter of an inch thick.

If you don't have a ruler, you can eyeball it.

Looks about as thick as that.

If you don't have anything to roll with you can just use your hand and now you can make whatever you want.

So, you can use some cookie cutters if you want and cut out some shapes.

I've got some cute nature shapes since we're talking about science today, some animals and some stars and a sun and a flower.

I'm using a little butter knife, it's sharp enough to cut through my dough but it's not so sharp that it's gonna cut the surface that's underneath.

I've got a nice tough table here.

If you are not working on a nice tough table then you probably wanna put plate or a place mat or something else under your dough if you're gonna use something to cut it by hand.

I give my cookie cutters a little wiggle after I press them through my dough just to make sure that they get nice and cut out and separated from the other dough that's around them.

That makes them easier to pick up.

If you want, you can use a spatula or the end of your butter knife or something else that's thin and hard to help scoop up your shapes from your table.

Be gentle when you move your shapes so they don't fall apart or get squished into weird shapes that you didn't expect.

If your dough is getting way too soft and it's starting to get sticky or hard to work with, you can always put it in the fridge for a few minutes and let it chill.

I'd say at least 10 minutes, maybe 20 minutes and that will help it cool down after being warm in your hands, it can get a little more solid again and be a little easier to work with.

I'm gonna try and make a cheeseburger.

I'm gonna make all my parts separately I think.

Let me make a slice of cheese, try make it nice and square, I wanna make this nice and thin so it dries really (indistinct).

Obviously need a patty for my cheeseburger.

So let's see if I can get a little round disc that's about the same size and I'll roll it into a ball and squish it up.

Not totally super flat and thin like my cheese, that's a little small, let's make it a little bigger.

You start with a round sphere of dough and then you squish it down flat, it should give you a pretty good circle.

I'm not worried about it being perfect.

I just want it to be pretty close.

I'm gonna put this cookie tray outside to dry in the sunshine.

The reason that salt dough dries so well when we make sculptures and objects out of it I because it's made with some dry ingredients like flour and salt and water.

Water evaporates really easily, especially if you put it out in the heat.

So the water in this mixture when we put it outside or leave it in a warm dry place is going to evaporate, it's gonna leave the dough and go up into the air into the atmosphere leaving nice, dry, hard shapes for us.

Ooh, you know what?

I have a idea.

I'm gonna take this little circle, I'm gonna take a pencil and while my dough is wet I'm gonna make a little hole at the top.

That way when the dough dries there's gonna be a nice little hole in there.

I can put a string through it and turn it into necklace or charm or an ornament or some kind of decoration or badge.

Just have to make sure that hole stays open while it dries.

For most of the shapes that I've made I've started with what we call a slab.

When you're working with clay or dough, a slab is basically a big flat shape.

Another clay technique that we can use with our salt dough is coiling.

So if you take your dough and you start with little ball and then you roll it out with the palm of your hand slowly and gently, it spreads out into a nice long noodle of dough.

It's gonna start out thick and then it'll get thinner and thinner as you roll it out more.

Okay, I am finished making my shapes.

I have some leftover salt dough, so what I'm gonna do with this is squish it all into one big ball so that it all stays together and stays nice and moist.

I don't want it to dry out 'cause I might wanna use it later.

So I'm gonna make one big ball out of it, put it back in my bowl.

My bowls a little too big now but that's okay, it's already dirty so I'm gonna leave it.

I'm gonna cover it again with my damp towel, so I soaked my towel in just a little bit of water.

It's not dripping wet, it's just a little bit wet and I'm gonna put this in the refrigerator because I can use it for another two or three days probably, as long as I keep it damp and as long as I keep it cool.

If you leave it out in the sun it's gonna dry out and harden but if you keep it in the fridge it'll last for a couple of days and then I'm going to take my tray of finished shapes and I'm gonna bring it outside to dry in the sun.

Once I bring them out there, I'm gonna check on them every couple of hours by just giving them a little tap and once the tops feel dry, I'll flip them over so that the bottoms can dry out as well.

They need to be completely dry before we decorate them with paint or markers or glitter or anything like that otherwise they're more likely to break and fall apart when we pick them up.

So, I'm gonna take these outside, I'll let them dry and then we'll come back and decorate them.

You'll know your salt dough shapes are ready to decorate when they feel hard and dry with no soft or squishy spots.

If you're painting them, you can use tempera or poster paints although acrylic paints will last the longest.

I've seen some salt dough ornaments that are as old as I am.

Have fun and be creative, then display your salt dough creations as tiny works of art or give them as gifts.

In the meantime, my amazing art teacher friend, Catherine Jones is going to show us how to make our very own plants from scratch.

Catherine's cool creative cactus project uses a process called paper mache which makes three dimensional objects and sculptures from paper.

The first examples of paper mache showed up around 2000 years ago during the Han Dynasty in China.

That makes a lot of sense because paper itself was invented during the Han Dynasty.

Over the next several 100 years, paper mache goods and the process of making them spread from China to other parts of Asia, including India and Persia which is now Iran.

Eventually they were exported to different parts of Europe, including England and France.

That's where the art form got the name paper mach which is French for mashed paper.

Paper mache has been used to make bowls, boxes, masks, decorative objects, furniture, and even boats.

In the 1800s a company in Troy, New York dedicated an entire factory to manufacturing paper mache canoes.

So what is the science behind paper mache?

How does simple ingredients like paper, water and flour come together to create things that are hard, strong and even waterproof?

Transforming these into these takes a series of physical reactions.

A physical reaction is when there's a change in the appearance or form of something without changing its composition or how it's made up.

So we'll end up with the same thing we started with.

Although it may look, smell or feel different.

This is different from a chemical reaction which happens on a molecular level when atomic bonds are broken or created, that means we would end up with something that's fundamentally different than what we started with.

We are talking physical changes today.

So once I turn things over to Catherine, you'll see her whisk together some flour and water to create a solution.

A solution is a liquid mixture in which one substance is equally distributed within another substance.

In our case, the flower will be equally distributed throughout the water.

That'll be our first physical reaction because although the ingredients will keep their original composition, they'll start to take on new properties and look and feel different.

The coolest physical reaction in this project happens after the paper mache mixture has been applied to the core of your sculpture.

Once all three materials are interacting with one another, make some observations about the properties of your paper mache.

Pay attention to the texture of your sculpture.

Is it rough, smooth, lumpy, glossy?

How does its appearance change throughout the process?

Is it dull or does it reflect light?

How squishy or hard is it at each point in the process?

Does the flour and water solutions smell the same as the finished sculpture?

All right, I think that's enough for me, Catherine, show us how it's done.

- My name is Catherine and today I'm gonna be showing you how to make a paper mache cactus.

What you'll need for the first step is newspaper and masking tape.

You might also want to have sketches of some ideas for what you're gonna make so that you have a visual example to use as inspiration.

So what I'm gonna do is use my newspaper to create the shape of the cactus that I wanna create.

This is going to be your armature that you're going to do your paper mache layers on top of, so it doesn't have to be super neat.

It can be kind of rough.

So I have my first shape.

It's just balled up into kind of like a long rounded rectangle.

Now I'm gonna use my tape to tape it in place.

(upbeat music) Next thing I'm working on is making two shapes to go on the side of my cactus to make my cactus' arms.

If I wanted to attach some extra pieces to my main shape, I would want to try and get roughly the shape that I want and hold it up to my main shape to see what it's gonna look like before I attach it.

It can also be helpful to have a pair of scissors for this part, just to help you cut and shape the newspaper.

(upbeat music) so now I'm finished with the main form for my paper mache and I have some newspaper leftover so I'm gonna use my leftover newspaper to make some smaller succulents to go into the pot with my cactus when I finish and after that we will start our paper mache.

To make my paper mache mixture I use about one cup of flour and about one cup of water and I just mix it up til it's nice and smooth and I say hello to my fur assistant who wanted to come check things out.

I mix that up and make sure that I put down a material underneath of my paper mache mixture because it can get a little messy.

I just used a black trash bag here to protect my counter and I'm using some one inch wide strips of newspaper to cover the whole surface of my cactus that I made from my newspaper before.

So I dip my newspaper strip in and use my fingers to squeeze it out so it's not dripping with lots and lots of extra paper mache material and I just layer that right on top until it is all the way covered.

I like to let my paper mache dry either overnight or in the sun for a few hours and then I like to go over it with a layer of white paint before I go in with my greens.

Now notice my paper mache is still is kinda bumpy and a little lumpy, that's okay for your cactus, it's gonna help create texture for the surface of your cactus once you finish it with the green paint.

So don't worry too much about the lumps and the bumps, that's okay.

Now I'm just using my white paint, trying to make sure I get every spot covered.

I love painting so this is my favorite part of the process.

I like to use a few different shades of green to cover the surface of my white paint which is already dried and I like to use some medium green paint, I also like to dip my brush into a darker shade of green to stipple on the surface of my cactus to make it have kind of a prickly, spiky texture.

Now my cactus has dried overnight and I'm ready to put it all together in it's pot and to add all the extra little things I want to make it look really special.

I'm gonna use some fabric flowers here and I also have some rocks that I can add in to the base of my cactus to make it kind of look like a little more realistic.

So I have my little extra piece of my cactus that I can use to either add into my pot here or I can add it on top of my cactus.

So before I glue anything with my hot glue gun, I'm jus gonna figure out where I want everything to go first.

All right, I have my rocks, I have my cactus blooms on here and I have all of my little parts attached and I think that my paper mache cactus is complete.

- Thanks, Catherine.

I'm excited to have a cactus in my house that won't poke me when I try to touch it.

(screaming) Now that we've rolled up our sleeves, gotten our hands a little dirty and made some 3D art that uses a little math and science, we're gonna switch gears and focus on an art form that uses sight more than touch.

Meet Berenice Abbott.

Berenice was a photographer who lived from 1898 to 1991.

That's 93 years.

She saw two World Wars and a whole century's worth of changes and developments in the way the world works.

Her most famous collection of pictures was called Changing New York and it documented the many ways the city was changing and growing during the 1930s, including the advancements in engineering and architecture that allowed the city's famous skyscrapers to soar higher and higher.

In the 1950s, Berenice worked with a team of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to produce a series of photographs that illustrated scientific ideas.

Berenice had a wonderful way of capturing the facts of a science experiment, no filters or Photoshop for her and also using her artist's eye to make pictures that were beautiful.

Her photos are so stunning and accurate that they were used to illustrate science textbooks for decades.

We're going to take a walk in Berenice Abbott's shoes.

So grab a camera, a phone or anything that takes pictures and let's go see how our world works.

I have left my corner and come outside to find some things to photograph that relate to science, math, technology and engineering.

Now you might be sitting there thinking that's a lot of things, pretty much everything that makes up our world relates in some way to one of those subjects.

So I'm gonna narrow it down a little bit for my project.

I'm gonna try to focus on some smaller topics within the world of science.

Personally, I'm gonna look for things that are mechanical.

So things that are manmade and made up of different parts that work together to move or make things happen.

I'm gonna look for symmetry and I'm also gonna look for diverse species of plants.

I'm gonna go around my yard and see how many different types of plants and leaves and flowers I can find.

All right, now I'm gonna go look for some plants.

I don't know where to look though.

Do you guys see any plants?

Behind me?

Oh yeah.

Good job.

(applauding) One of the things Berenice Abbott was known for is her use of a bird's eye view and a worm's eye view in her photography.

A bird's eye view is when a photographer positions themselves above their subject.

Looking down on it, imagine a bird flying above you and looking down on you from the sky.

A worm's eye view is when a photographer gets down to a very low angle and looks up at their subject like a worm sitting on the ground.

This dahlia has awesome radial symmetry which means it's symmetrical all the way around.

Remember, symmetry is when a shape or object has two completely identical sides that face each other.

Radial symmetry means that we could draw a line or an axis in any direction across the object and the two sides would still be symmetrical.

When we take a picture, just like when we make other kinds of art, we think about how the parts of the picture are arranged.

This is what artists refer to as a pictures composition.

Berenice Abbott and other photographers use a mathematical tool called the rule of thirds to help them create pictures with compelling compositions.

The rule of thirds is based on fractions.

It says that if you divide a picture into three equal parts, top to bottom and three equal parts side to side, the most interesting part of the picture should be at the intersection of two of those lines.

So what happens if I change the composition of a picture to follow the rule of thirds?

What do you think?

which of these pictures has the more interesting composition?

When she worked with scientists at MIT, Berenice Abbott photographed principles of physical science that were hard to observe with the naked eye, like mechanics, electromagnetism and the behavior of light.

You might be able to find some of the same things to experiment within your photography but you can also document natural phenomena like the life cycles of plants or bugs, the wildlife or biological diversity in your area, simple machines or complex inventions.

Today, we hopped on the steam train and dug into science, technology, engineering, art and math.

We got our hands a little messy and found a new lens to help us notice the incredible natural and invented things that exist all around us.

I hope you all had as much fun as I did and I'll see you back here next time in the Creative Corner.

the mission of Art For The Journey is to overcome barriers and transform lives through creating art.

Every day, Art For The Journey provides art programs designed to promote wellbeing for children and adults in underserved communities.

We believe art heals.

100s of volunteers and support from the community make our work possible.

To learn more about Art For The Journey, visit our website www.ArtForTheJourney.org.

(upbeat music)