A diorama for the ages

After about four weeks of hard work, Evangeline's big school project is nearly finished.

Way back at her second parent-teacher-student conference, Evangeline agreed to create a diorama and write a book report connected to Mary Pope Osborne's "Dingoes at Dinnertime," from the popular Magic Treehouse series. This is in addition to her research project on children's author Roald Dahl. I hope never to get stuck doing two big projects like this again, but with the end now in sight, it has been a blast working on this with her.

Although I said "working with her" just now, she's really done most of the work. The only things I've done have been to cut the cardboard with a sharp knife, help her a tie a rope ladder together, and guide through the entire project. The actual work has been all hers, pretty much.

We started out making a topographical map. Evangeline told me where she wanted a stream, drew it on a piece of cardboard, and I started cutting. After that, she drew more or less matching curves on other sheets of cardboard, and I cut those out too. Once we had all the cardboard cut out, she glued the layers together, to create a gently sloping embankment on each side of the stream.

The next step, which took longer than it needed to because she found the task monotonous, was to paint the cardboard yellow. After a few days of her getting tired after five minutes of this, I gave her the old Atari incentive, and she painted the entire thing green. The result was a nice textured looking clearing. The yellow and green brush strokes combine to create the appearance of grass. Nice effect.

After that were the actual banks of the river. We had some sand left over from her Temple project, so she put down a thick coat of Mod Podge and poured sand onto it to create the banks.

She made the stream the next day with more Mod Podge and strips of crumpled up colored tissue paper. She had the idea of mixing two different shades of blue paper, so the water not only has a rippling surface from the crumples, but it looks like it has cooler and warm parts, owing to the darker and lighter shades.

The next big part involved measuring the sides of the diorama and having Daddy cut more sheets for the three walls. These Evangeline gave a primary coat of white finger paint, although I allowed her to enlist her sister's help in this step. (Rachel in fact had so much fun that she painted some other pieces of cardboard on her own.)

The next day, after these had dried, Evangeline took some bright yellow paint, mixed it on the cardboard with more white finger paint, and used her flat Mod Podge brush to turn the entire surface a light, warm yellow. It looked like sunlight on the cardboard, which was the idea. I took these outside to dry in the sun, which they did, and turned my mind to figuring out how she could make the trees.

How else, but more finger paint? I put some brown finger paint on the center of a piece and showed her in the air what I wanted her to do. She got the idea immediately, and rushed her hands upward through the gelatinous stuff, streaking trunks across the sunlight, and twisting branches out of the trunks. I have to admit that I was really uncertain at this stage how things were going to turn out. She got a little carried away on her first tree, and had to make it twice as broad to fix the error, although she learned from her error and was more careful on the other sheets.

Yesterday, she mixed some more of that bright yellow paint with a turquoise blue, and when she was satisfied with the consistency of green, dabbed cotton swabs in the paint and onto the branches of the trees. She used seventeen of them in all, but the effect was stunning -- you really feel as though you're looking at leaves on the trees, with dark patches and light patches, places where the sun suffuses through the canopy, and other places where you can see the branches just beneath the surface or even poking through. The bottom of each sheet contains some bushes and other growth, places where the trees are covered, and places where they are not. It's really quite a stunning piece of work.

Today I duct-taped the sides to one another and to the base, guided her through the process of building the tree house using Popsicle sticks she had painted brown at some point during the project, and helped her make a rope ladder to hang from the tree house. On her own, she came up with the idea of making tiny books to put inside the tree house, since that's how the magic works. Jack and Annie open a book, point at a picture and say "I wish I could go there," and they're off on another ten-chapter adventure.

Tonight I figured out how to mount the treehouse effectively on the side of the diorama without punching holes in anything, so all that remains for tomorrow is that we will mount the treehouse, hang the ladder, and put Jack, Annie and Teddy into the diorama. Perhaps she also can make a kangaroo to put down by the stream.

Oh yes, she's also supposed to write a book report about the crazy book.

It's quite a piece of work that she's done, and she really has done it herself. All I've done to help her is to guide her through the process and do the parts that involved sharp objects. It's been an adventure for both of us, and I'm sure it's been as educational for her in artistry and tenacity as it has been fascinating for me to see it all coming together. You could see the pride she had in the project tonight when we put the walls on and she saw how it was turning out. The only real flaw I see is that we forgot about the stream, and it now flows either into or out from a large tree on the far side of the diorama.

I'm quite proud of her, although I have to say I'll be relieved to get this out of the way. This is the extra project. She's doing a written report on Roald Dahl that's also due by the end of the month, when she'll make a presentation to the class. She's doing a bang-up job on that too, although she'll have to do a second draft, since her first one spells "Roald" at least five different ways, mostly involving an H and it reads rather much like the Wikipedia entry on Dahl that is one of her two major sources.

I really need to get remote hosting set up for graphics for this blog, and I need to get my scanner working too. You need to see this creation to believe it.