Notorious Outlaws!

This was the first of our 'Westward Ho!' themed Summer Art Camp projects.  

Our wild rootin-tootin artists learned how to create soft pastel self-portraits while immersing themselves into the Old West era to create a humorous storyline/narrative along the way: what kind of an lawless, cantankerous scoundrel am I? 

The little buckaroos then designed their own WANTED posters with creative hand lettering and descriptive writing skills to construct a humorous, compelling, readable poster.

We started by choosing a good wild-west cowboy/girl name. Most of us (including me) had great Old West names to start with, so that was easy. We simply elaborated on them to get just the right name, using a few online ideas for the best cowboy names and cowgirl names. 

Then we decided on what type of notorious outlaws we were: your typical stagecoach robbers or cattle rustlers, or maybe something a bit sillier, like stagecoach stowaways or cat rustlers!

We created the written portions of our posters on the backside of very old, yellowed manila graph paper (yes, I have some, for some reason) (which, goes to show why art teachers never throw anything away). We left a large section in the center for the portraits, which we created on a separate sheet of manila paper in soft pastels and charcoal pencil. 

My Sample

I encouraged our lawless ones to use sepia tones and avoid very bright colors to keep that 'worn,' old-time look. We sprayed the portraits with hairspray to prevent smearing, and glued them to the posters. Then we attached the posters to a 12" x 18" sheet of brown sulfite paper on which a few boards had been previously "nailed," and we drew tacks in the corners of the posters with a Sharpie. 

The original idea for this project comes from Deep Space Sparkle’s Gunslingers & Outlaws lesson for 4^th thru 6^th grade.