My feelings about Jeff Koon’s art changed after my art students created their versions of the well-known Jeff Koons Balloon Dog sculptures. I didn’t know much about the artist or his work before this project, but his Balloon Animal series seemed so so and extremely overpriced (91.1 million dollars for a Balloon Rabbit sculpture in 2019!”)

It also rubbed me the wrong way when artists have unnamed assistants completing art for them but not sharing in the profits, and that’s the case for Jeff Koon’s art. (Modern artists like Kehinde Wiley, Damian Hirst, Takashi Murakami, as well as classics artists like Andy Warhol, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Rubens also used the assistant system to complete art.) Anyway…

Those reasons kept me from spending time getting to know Jeff Koon’s art. But regardless of how you feel about that, he’s the 2nd most successful living artist in the world today. So, as a class, we looked together at his art and discussed what we saw, connections we made, etc. when we looked at his Balloon Dog sculptures.

The students looked at the work and discussed it with fresh eyes, and I had a partial transformation of how I viewed it through them. Thought provoking class discussions about the costs of his sculptures set brains whirring.

Many versions of this project are available, but I especially liked the Deep Space Sparkle version.

We traced 9 ovals onto a piece of construction paper. Then we traced black around the ovals with a bingo dauber or big Sharpie.

We imagined what our cityscapes would look like as our Balloon Dog floats soared past, then we drew it.

After drawing our cities and tearing the green grass, we arranged and glued down our highlighted and shaded ovals to create a balloon dogs.

This project is a keeper!

After getting the ovals ready for color, we looked at the sculptures and noted where we saw a light highlight, a darker tint of the color, and the regular color. We used this as our guide for painting. (Painting first then cutting the next week is so much easier, ha.)