Kids Make Cool Art: John T. Unger Sculptural Firebowls + Art

My friend Maggie brought her two boys over to see the studio yesterday. I had promised them that they could try their hand at cutting out a steel drawing using the plasma cutter. I think they did a great job!

I spent some time before their visit explaining over the phone to Jacob what kind of drawings work best for this and asked him to help his little brother with his drawing. I also showed the boys some of the drawings in steel that my daughter Mya did when she was here this summer. Jacob had brought a pretty workable realistic drawing of a dog, but in the process of transfering it to the steel, he came up with what you see below. I think the "cartoony" version is actually a lot mor fun in some ways. While Jacob worked on his drawing, I helped Simon turn his stick figure fairy into something that could be cut out from steel.

The basic trick is to remember that you're cutting out shapes, not lines… and also, that if you want to draw lines inside the shape, you have to leave a bit of steel uncut so that the piece doesn't fall out. The best example of this is the eye or nose on Jacob's dog. If the lines that make the shape of the eye go all the way around, then the inside of the eye is cut free of the piece and falls out. Another example is the sun in Simon's sculpture. In his drawing, it was just a circle hanging in space. So we added the pointy sun rays and made sure that a couple of them touched the Empire State Building. Problem solved!

Jacob is eight and Simon is five. Jacob did almost all the cutting on his sculpture after a little practice on some scrap steel. Simon was a bit more spooked by the sparks, so he let me cut his sculpture out for him while he held onto my cutting hand. It was pretty cute.

There's something pretty remarkable about the way kids' sculptures turn out. There's a real charm to the work that I could never emulate in a million years now. I just love the way they look as sculpture and the way that giving kids a chance to do something this permanent gets them excited about art.