Cake Collages Inspired by Wayne Thiebaud

I love dessert. And these are the kind of desserts I can afford to have around! The students and I have been studying the art of Wayne Thiebaud (pronounced tee-bow), and his love of all things sweet. We started by making a tablecloth out of tissue paper squares that I had cut ahead of time. Some children made abstract designs, while others made checkerboards, stripes or even fancy place mat designs.

Next we traced a slice of cake template four times onto a separate sheet of paper. I'm not a big fan of templates, but for this project we needed our subject matter to fit and be somewhat uniform. I pointed out the variations in Thiebaud's cakes according to flavors of cake, icing, and number of layers in each slice. The children used construction paper crayons to color their slices of cake, and then cut each of them out.

The last portion of the collage was plates. We used Blue Bunny Ice Cream lids as templates (they are also being saved for our bottle cap murals), and they were the perfect size. Then cakes and plates were glued to the tablecloths. A few of my older students drew cake shadows on their plates and/or rims to give them more dimension. All in all this was a great project that all of the kids enjoyed. And I was happy that the final pieces were a bit more colorful and kid oriented than the original inspiration. Dessert anyone?