Fabulous Earth, Air and Water T-Shirts

This is an activity that's become a standard activity with the groups of Central American Youth Ambassadors who visit Alamo Colleges each year. We just wrapped up a week with 23 ambassadors from four countries, paired with 20 or so host kids from San Antonio's Legacy High School and the International School of the Americas (housed at Lee High School).

We start with some cutting and collage activities, then a little design seminar based on the Sensory Alphabet and then each participant cuts and pastes a logo design. The kids are in teams -- Earth, Air and Water -- serving as the "voices for the voiceless" for a short presentation that wraps up the activities each week. 

I wanted to share their designs and a little of the work-in-progress, because I think this design technique has some fine applications for coming up with art quilt designs, as well as screen print or stamp and stencil images.

The "warmup" design activities include learning how to cut notan designs, as you can see. But the kids often take the technique into new directions -- or use a different technique as they design their logo. After collecting each groups designs, I photographed them, ran each design through the "stamp" filter in Photoshop (that took out any variation in contrast and made each design a high contrast black-and-white image, even though my photos had shadows and backgrounds. Then I cropped and arranged the design images into an 8.5" by 11" design, printed it on the laser printer and made thermofaxes for each group to print in black on t-shirts. After printing, the kids colored their designs with fabric markers, and, later at the event, each autographed and wrote messages to each other.

Cutting designs.