Beautiful Bug Collages
Did you know a butterfly can taste with its feet? Or that honey bees have tiny hairs on their eyes to help them navigate? Insects are pretty amazing creatures and at The Museum we’re especially excited because of the current exhibit featuring them in The West Gallery, The Art of Eric Carle: Bees, Butterflies, and Other Bugs. The project Beautiful Bug Collages gives guests the chance to work with colorful paper and wire and become insect inventors!
A few other materials we have to work with at each table: markers, scissors, rolls of masking tape, and glue sticks.
Using Photoshop we designed a mini Insect Idea Book filled with different bug body diagrams and facts about weird and unusual bugs. I definitely learned a lot about insects in the process! Did you know there are more insects in one square mile of rural land than there are human beings on the entire earth? Or that each year, insects eat 1/3 of the Earth’s food crop? That’s a lot of bugs eating a lot of plants!
The Art Studio’s summer intern, Beth created a variety of interesting laminated templates to help guests trace and cut out bug-inspired shapes for heads, bodies, wings and other parts. First she traced a range of different shapes onto construction paper and cut them out with an Xacto knife before laminating the sheets. Once laminated, she cut the plastic away from the centers of each shape (she did this to 22 pages!) so there is a space to easily trace.
There are five different templates to choose from at each table. The small label just asks guests to not cut them.
If guests decide to leave their bug at The Museum, Studio staff hang them (appropriately with pins) in The Carle’s Cabinet Of Curious Bugs display.
New insects are added every day!
To create the display we traced several large black circles onto white drawing paper, colored the circles in with black crayon and pinned the circles into a grid on our back bulletin board. Inside each circle we pin a guest’s bug and on a strip of red construction paper, they write in a name for the bug.
On our front wall is a fun display of bugs crawling in and out of large collecting jars. Here our interns Beth and Camille are hanging new additions to the display.
It’s a blast seeing how guests use these materials to make their real or imaginary bugs. Check out just some of their creations below!
For a list of current and upcoming Every Day Art Projects, visit our events page.
