Retro Neon Signs: Art Lesson with Chalk Pastels

This video will teach you how to work with chalk pastels to create a retro neon sign. The materials needed for this lesson are black construction paper, the size being your choice, pencil and paper for sketching, and chalk pastels. My husband Ryan Teal came up with this lesson and we've been working with our 8th grade students on creating neon signs with a theme of inspirational quotes. Our students are first asked to create small colored sketches of their sign and then they create a large full-scale version on white paper, which we later transfer onto the black vinyl construction paper. To push our students' creativity, we ask them to include at least seven shapes in their sign and at least three different font styles. Before using chalk pastels on our final piece, we do some practice work with our students. Using smaller pieces of black paper placed on top of a paper towel, we ask our students to start with just a white pastel and to draw one letter. Next, students are instructed to choose one color and a lighter and darker version of that color. If they trace the white letter on both sides of the line with the lighter color followed by the darker color, they will begin to create the kind of glow you see in a neon light. We tell the students it's important to make sure to use both of these colors on both sides of the white though, including inside the letter spaces. We also advise not to do any blending or smudging with the fingers at this time. With chalk pastels, you can create thin lines or thick lines depending on which side of the chalk you are pressing against the paper. We have our students try out these different types of lines. Then, with very light pressure, we ask the students to feather the color around the letter and to take one finger and to gently smudge the color into the black paper. Just notice how we avoid touching the lighter part of the letter and we're really just using the smudging to blend the darker area into the black. You'll notice as I work that dust forms on my paper and sometimes I need to gently tap the paper onto my paper towel to remove the dust. Always avoid blowing the dust. Next, for our second demonstration, I begin with a white circle filled in and I choose two or three additional colors. Using these colors, I blend concentric circles around the white from the lightest color into the darkest, most intense color. So, I'm going from white to yellow, then to light green, then to dark green here and I use my finger just to blend out that darker green into the black paper again. When I want to blend in other areas, I use layering of the pastels so that I don't remove color. Instead, I am adding color. I want my color to be bright and to glow. For the third demonstration, I begin with a line and for this demonstration, I'll only be using lines to create the illusion of fire or electricity. So, starting from a yellow line, I have my students work their way up from yellow to pink to orange and into red. Each time I make more lines, I'm half overlapping the previous color and half adding color onto the black paper. My final demonstration encourages the students to use only dots of color like pointillism or stippling. So, I begin again with white in the center followed by yellow and then I use the same colors I used previously with the lines to go from orange into red even into a red violet and as I'm making my concentric circles of dots again, I am partially overlapping and partially going into the black paper itself. After students have been taught these four techniques and have had time to practice them, they're ready to begin working on their final sign. So, our students at this point would have sketched, colored, and then drawn their sign on their full-sized sheet of white paper and we can then have them transfer this drawing onto their final piece of black paper. So, what we have our students do is to turn over their large white paper drawing and to take a pencil and cover the whole back side of the paper with pencil. We encourage them to use their pencil on its side so that they can do this quickly and we use a soft pencil so that we can get a lot of dark graphite on that paper. We then tape down the drawing to the black paper so that the pencil is on the back side and we'll place tape in at least two locations or four to make sure it's very secure. Then, using either a ballpoint pen or a colored colored pencil, we will trace over all of the lines pressing very firmly to transfer the pencil onto the black paper. Just make sure you check to see that the pencil is transferring because sometimes if you don't press hard enough you won't see enough of a line to know where your lines actually belong. And the whole purpose of doing this transfer method is to save you time and to have really accurate results drawn on the black paper so that you can just start working with pastels and there's no guesswork involved. When beginning with chalk pastels on the large black paper, we put down large sheets of opened up newspapers to help with the chalk dust. We encourage students to use the techniques that were practiced but also to experiment on their own. Things might get a little bit messy and it's not uncommon for you to feel like your drawing is looking worse before it looks better but we do have two things that might help you. Number one, an eraser. You can use an eraser to erase the smudges from the dust and also a q-tip. You can use a q-tip to help smudge in smaller spaces but do notice how it takes off a lot of the brightness of the color so you might have to then go back over areas with lighter colors to brighten them up. Another thing you can do to control the smudging and smearing is put down a paper towel underneath your hand as you work so that you don't smear areas that you had already finished. We also find it necessary to remind our students often that their work is a work in progress until they call it finished and that it's okay for their final drawing to look a little different than their sketch. In fact, if they decide they want to change colors completely or make additions that were not in the sketch at all, that is completely welcome and encouraged. We think this assignment creates amazing inspirational and eye-catching results. I hope this video helped explain how we present this assignment to our students. Thanks for watching! Bye!