Animal Assemblage

For our last unit we chose an animal and made a sculpture out of all recycled materials. I decided for my animal to be a turtle. My inspiration for this project was the news about all the plastic in the ocean and how sea turtles are dying from ingesting plastic, instead of what they think is jelly fish ect. My original idea changed from using plastic, to using less plastic and more recycled materials. The materials I used to create my turtle were the following: newspaper for my armature, yarn, paint chips, old plant pots, a party hat, and buttons for my eyes. I started by building my armature—"the bones"— out of balled up newspaper and tape. This process went a lot faster than I expected. Next, I started to brain storm what I was going to used for the outside layer of my turtle. I ended up choosing old plant pots because they were green and had cool patterns that I could incorporate for my shell. I used paint chips to cover under the turtle's shell like a layer of skin. Finally, to cover my legs and head I decided to use yarn and wrap it around my legs and head. This worked really well. One challenge I did run into was during the assemblage process because I was gluing things at awkward angles and they didn't stay put. The glue was also so hot at one point it started to melt my plastic. These challenges were easy to overcome, but slowed down my process, and i wished I could have used that wasted time to add a few more details to my turtle. Overall I am very happy with the overall product because it wasn't exactly like my original plan, but I liked what I did better than my original plan. I was really proud of my problem solving skills and was able to use motor skills we learned from our last unit with wire to create my sculpture. If I were to change one thing about my project it would be to add a tail to my turtle, a small detail I wasn't able to get to.