Stencil with painted background

This is a cool stencil project that offers endless creative possibilities for high school students.

I'm super paranoid about using x-acto knives with students so I generally only use them with my high school students (Grade 10-12). Of course, if I have a particularly mature lower grade, they will use them as well. 

The first step is to create a stencil out of cardstock. This can be white or colored cardstock, but it needs to be a heavy paper. I left the subject open for my students. You can see below this student chose two Game of Thrones sigils- the House Stark direwolf proved far too challenging so he switched mid-way to House Greyjoy sigil. 

Once the stencil is cut out, he students design a background for it. This could be painted background or anything really. The students below chose to collage magazine pages to the back of her landscape stencil. 

Below you can see this student used a marker-watercolor technique 

for her background.

 

Some Grade 10-12 artworks below: