Very Hungry Caterpillar Watercolour Collage

"The Very Hungry Caterpillar" was my absolute favorite book as a young child. I loved the holes n the book pages and the colorful painted textures of the collage technique. 

For this lesson with my Grade 2's, we didn't create painted collage papers, instead did simple illustrations of the book using Sharpie and watercolour. Students drew all their images on heavy white paper, painted them, let them dry and they cut them all out and arranged them on a new sheet of paper. Oh, and of course, used a single hole punch to create 'holes' in our food ;)

Some of the Grade 2 results:

Pop Art Hearts Mixed Media

This is a fun and colourful project that I found on Instagram HERE on the art teacher account by Lauralee Chambers. Her photo was so whimsical and happy I knew I had to try the lesson.

We used bleeding art tissue- they type that dissolves its colour when wet. It can be tricky to find 

where I live so I order it online. 

So Grade 5 students chose their colours for the background and cut the tissue paper into large squares. I had pre-cut heavy white paper into squares. They wet the paper, lay down a tissue square then let dry and peeled them off at the end of class. This easily took one 40 minute period- some kids didn't even finish. I have to say that these were absolutely gorgeous on their own!! Once dry, though, I found the colours faded a bit and were lighter.

The next class, students folded a scrap sheet of copy paper in half and cut out a heart, making sure it was large enough to fill a good chunk of the background paper (we talk about focal point here). 

They trace their heart template onto the background paper and paint it with tempera. Some mixed in glitter glue for extra sparkle. 

Once dry, students added a chunky white highlight using chalk. Fun!

Red Barn in Perspective Painting

This was my attempt at teaching my Grade 6 class how to draw a traditional red barn in perspective. Perspective is one f those topics I really don't enjoy teaching. I think it's because it has a lot of math and logic involved- two area of major weakness for me! As an artist, visually I can draw in perspective and understand it, but I struggle with really verbally explaining it well to my students. So I tend to show a lot of photos and then draw the barn step by step on chart paper to visually explain it to students. It doesn't help that I hate using rulers to do it, preferring to draw freehand and I ask my kids to do the same. I find when kids use rulers, their drawing tend to end up very rigid and stiff. 

I find that Grade 6-ers love learning how t draw in perspective and they really put a lot of effort into this particular project. I had a lot of handouts and visuals available to them, despite this, I still had many kids who couldn't seem to get the perspective right, so had to do quite a bit of walking around, monitoring and correcting. 

So once they did a little practice, they drew their good copy on large white paper. 

Then they outlined them in Sharpie.

For colouring, I gave them a few options: watercolours, coloured pencils and liquid watercolours.

Here's some of the finished ones (more or less, some still in progress)