I recently came across Patty Baker‘s beautiful paintings on Pinterest.  I loved her painting of a sunset with birds in silhouette.  I thought the telephone poles going off in the distance would be a great opportunity to teach my older class about spacing in one point perspective.

We started by painting a sunset with tempera paint.  I emphasized subtly blending from one color to the next.  While those were drying, I introduced one point perspective and how you can use intersecting diagonals to achieve proper spacing.  We practiced this on copy paper.  By then, our backgrounds were dry, and we were able to add our birds, telephone poles, hills, and roads in silhouette.  They also added stars and any other details they chose.  I think these are just stunning!

Thank you Patty Baker for the inspiration!