With their distinct bright red coloring, cardinals make a wonderful subject for an art project. Since I have a wide variety of ages in my classes right now, I taught two different versions of this lesson. For the younger students, I did a guided directed drawing for the cardinal. The older students drew from photographs […]
I don’t usually use acrylic paint in class, especially not with elementary aged students. However, I came across a project that just wouldn’t work with tempera paint. This project was inspired by the book Ancient Thunder by Leo Yerxa. Yerxa’s illustrations are amazing. He studied tunics painted by the Ojibwe Indians. The original tunics were […]
This project began with the book Sandy’s Circus by Tanya Lee Stone. This book is actually about the artist, Alexander Calder. His nickname was Sandy. Calder began his career performing with a mechanical circus he built by hand. I told the kids that he basically created his own toys and was paid to let people […]
I love chalk pastel on black paper! The colors just glow! For this project, I made copies of animals from a Dover coloring book. Students chose an animal and drew from the picture, using a light colored chalk pastel. Using black and white coloring book pictures really helped students draw these complicated animals. It also […]
Our first project of the school year was based on John James Audubon. We began by reading The Boy Who Drew Birds. This book tells the story of John James Audubon and his fascination with birds. I found a great coloring book with line drawings of Audubon’s bird paintings. The line drawings in the coloring […]
These owls were so fun to draw. We drew them with colored Sharpie. The one drawing rule was to not lift their pen off the paper the whole time they were drawing. Most students really found this challenging. They process creates lots of smaller, interesting shapes that they never would have drawn lifting their pen. […]
I LOVE how this project turned out! I recently went to a workshop in Santa Barbara, CA. One of the speakers was Gina Lee. She did a very similar whale project. I made a few adjustments to make this work for my workshops. I couldn’t be more pleased with how they turned out! We […]
We did this clay project while we were doing our marigolds. We started out by painting square sheets of tag board for the background. Our goal was to create a subtle color change, gradually transitioning from one color to another. Then we got out the clay. For this project, we used Model Magic. This stuff […]
For the last couple of weeks we have been learning about the German artist, Franz Marc. We looked at several of Marc’s famous blue horses and read the book, The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse by Eric Carle. Carle uses painted paper in his illustrations, so we began this project by creating our own […]
I have tried this project at home using different mediums and was never quite happy with it. I finally decided to try it with liquid watercolor and oil pastels and knew this was going to be a winner. Controlling liquid watercolor with all the details was a challenge, but the oil pastel really helped. We […]
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