This year's dimensional art students were able to create pinch pots using air dry clay. Students were tasked with creating a functional pot that was based on an animal of their choice. Many students challenged themselves by adding features such as fur, hair, and other various accessories. The main challenge from this project was working against time to ensure their clay didn't dry out and having to figure out how to revive the clay. Another challenge came with pieces of the project falling off and students had to be resourceful when it came to repairing their project such as attempting to add more clay, leaving the piece out and blending the area where the break happened, or using hot glue to attach pieces.
Students were tasked with selecting an origami figure that they would learn how to fold on their own after several practices and then break apart the origami figure to simplify assembly when up-scaling it on a large sheet of tag board. Once students were done assembling their final version, they were challenged to paint Japanese inspired patterns on specific areas of the origami figure to resemble a folded origami figure. This was the most challenging project for some students because many of them had never done origami before and had to learn a new skill set. The other challenge came from simplifying the origami figure since they had to be very familiar with steps of folding their origami figure to find a starting point for making a template using the shapes from that starting point.
This is a project students were in the middle of working on during VAPA Week. Due to the complexity and scale of the project, students were able to collaborate in teams to create a large scale house made from cardboard that had features an actual house would have such as furniture, rooms, windows, doors, roof tiling, and flooring. Before adding all of these details, students had to create a floor plan and turnaround sketches of their ideas and create a basic prototype to understand the structure of their house. The prototypes do not have color or furniture, but many teams went above and beyond to add additional details to gain better understanding of what kind of house they were making. Another challenge students had was that the house had to open somehow to see the features inside. Many different methods were used such as a detachable roof, partially attached roof or wall that swiveled open, or detachable floors to reveal multiple layers.