Tree Books

This is Peg’s WebsiteThis is the art gallery’s website

It took two months to make a book with two pieces of cardboard, some paper cutouts and some poems. Sounds pretty stupid right? Well it’s not, it was actually really cool.

My Language Arts class started the tree books on March 15, 2021 with a local artist Peg Gignoux; she comes to DA every year to work with 6th graders on this book. I really enjoyed working with Peg one because she’s so nice and two she really taught me a lot about this kind of art.

We started with screen printing. Screen printing is when you take a stencil, put it over paper, put a line of paint at the top and then put a squeegee at the top and then pull it down. It reminded me of those glass cleaners on the side of buildings. After I folded the paper we glued the two cardboard tree cutouts on. After we glued the pieces of cardboard on I looked at it for a little bit and wondered how I was going to make this look good. I didn’t really enjoy the akua ink part just because it got boring rolling paint on rubber mats for 45 minutes. But without the akua ink, the inside of my book would almost be blank. The collaging part was probably the most important part of decorating the book. Because I cut out the paper I did akua ink on and made trees and a little man. Ms. Donnelly really likes the man; I accidentally made it look like he was thinking because I put my life list right over his head. I added these little things on the book called clasp envelopes and decorated them with akua ink paper. After that I put print outs of my life list, when this is over, and my roots poem in.

Making the actual book was exciting but not the most important part to me. The most important part or parts were the poems. We made 3 poems: My Roots, Life List, When This Is Over. Well life list wasn’t really a poem but I’ll count it. My personal favorite was the Roots poem because it was about my dad. I think it meant a lot to him. So once we were done with our tree books we presented them in a local art gallery called Frank Gallery in University Mall. I thought it was cool presenting them in a public place where people spend thousands of dollars on something they don’t even do anything with. I also liked seeing everyone’s art because they just worked for two months on it. I also got to see the 7th graders hero books. I’m not sure what they meant but it was cool. 

I went there with my dad. My mom had come earlier because she had something to do. It was really nice seeing everyone’s books; they all looked great. Here’s a photo of me, my dad, and my brother. For some reason none of us are looking at the camera.