Radial Seascape Watercolours

This was a perfect end of the year project. It didn't take too long to finish,  and it kept the kids engaged. I traced a large circle onto sheets of smooth 8 x 11" cardstock. Students used watercolour and painted it generously with lots of water and paint to create little puddles of pigment. Then they laid plastic wrap over-top. Let these dry overnight and you will be left with a beautiful watery pattern from the plastic wrap.

On a separate sheet of paper, students drew an underwater creature of their choice. 

They coloured them using either watercolour or coloured pencils. Cut out the water circle, then the object and glue it on top. These took about 2- 40 minute period to complete.

Egyptian Portraits and Cartouches

My Grade 6 class completes a unit on Egyptian art every year. We do a portrait of King Tut or Cleopatra and then make a cartouche of our name. 

It's easy to find cartouche patterns/templates online. HERE for example.

My kids used a hieroglyph handout to translate their name and wrote it vertically on the handout. Then they coloured it with whatever media they wanted. Then they cut them out.

On heavy white paper they had to paint or colour some sort of border design.

Once finished the cartouche was glued on top of the border paper.

Plasticine Pictures: Seasons

My mixed Grade 4-6 class recently completed these plasticine/modelling clay pictures. They are based on the work of Canadian artist/illustrator Barbara Reid. She uses plasticine to illustrate children's books. Her website is wonderful and has video tutorials of how she uses plasticine to create her pictures. I showed these to my students before we began the project.

I previously posted this lesson HERE that I did with younger grades- their theme was farm animals. 

I wanted to try these again with my older grades and many of them remembered doing 

them in Grade 2. The theme I gave this class was: Seasons.

This time they used the inside cuts of mat board. I get them for free from my local Michaels. It worked really well as it's really thick and sturdy. I also gave the option of using the paper plates they used before. They started off with a basic sketch of their landscape. 

Then they work from the background to the foreground, mixing colours if they need to.

I buy my plasticine in big blocks then chop it up with a knife 

and store the lumps in zip lock bags. 

Some Grade 4 - 6 results:

Observational Shoe Contour Drawing with Patterns

This was an excellent contour shoe drawing lesson I found on The Art of Ed website HERE. 

I used this as a sub lesson when I was away for a conference recently. I left it for Grades 4-9. It was perfect because it only needed minimal supplies and no mess for the sub! The younger grades said it was 'really hard' and my Grade 7-9 students had no problem at all with it. I feel like all the students did really well with it nonetheless!

They started with an observational drawing of their shoe on regular copy paper.

Then they outlined their shoe in Sharpie.

Then they broke up the background into large sections and drew a pattern in each one. 

The background was coloured using markers.

I love the Crayola Tropical series.

Some Grade 7-9 results:

Grade 4 - 6 results: