Northern Lights Arctic Landscape painting

 

For this mixed-media project, Grade 4-6 students explored the beauty and ingenuity of Canada’s North. They learned about traditional igloos used by the Inuit in northern Canada—how they were carefully constructed from blocks of compacted snow and why their dome shape makes them a strong, efficient architectural structure for Arctic conditions. 

"Igloo" (from Inuktitut iglu) means "house" or "home" in Inuit languages.

Inuit are the Indigenous people of the Arctic, numbering approx 70,545 in Canada, who primarily reside in Inuit Nunangat, a vast northern homeland spanning 40% of Canada's landmass and 72% of its coastline.

After looking at photos of northern lights, students began by painting vibrant Northern Lights using watercolours, experimenting with colour blending and movement to capture the magic of the night sky. They sprinkled salt on the wet paint to create a textural effect. Let dry overnight.

They then carefully drew their own igloo on a separate sheet, adding subtle shading with pencils and blue pencil crayons to create dimension and form. I showed them how to draw one on my easel but there are many tutorials online or on Youtube to follow along with. Finally, they cut out their igloos and collaged them onto their painted backgrounds. 

These artworks celebrates both the natural beauty and innovative design of Canada’s northern landscape.

 

Exaggerated Drawings

 

This is actually a project I did in high school. I still have my original believe it or not.

It's a very valuable drawing assignment great for practicing value and shading.

This is a technique used quite a lot in advertising and design: scale exaggeration. You could also discuss the design principles; this one relating to proportion and how artists can manipulate and exaggerate proportion to express moods and experiences.

Here are the directions: Find an appropriate image in a magazine: you're going to cut off part of the image and visually 'stretch' the missing part using pencil. Using figures tends to be quite popular but it can be anything, really. If students can only find colour images, then just photocopy them so they have a black and white image to work with. Glue the magazine image onto a piece of drawing paper and then you're ready to go. The key is to make them match the photo in terms of accurate shading.  You want to fool the eye.

Grade 10-12 finished artworks:

this is Boris Johnson, lol

Cozy Creatures in Winter art project

This was a quick and adorable art lesson I developed for a 40 minute class I had to teach. Normally my periods are 80 minutes long, so it was a challenge to find a project my Grade 7-9 students could complete in that short time. 

I found this small winter themed scrapbook paper at Dollarama. I've never seen anything like it- it looks definitly AI produced but I was here for it! Any teacher who visited my room and saw it LOVED it, lol.

The paper was about 5 x 5". There were about 8 different designs- as students walked in, they chose one.

I used regular photocopy paper and split it into 4 pieces, so each square was small. The students googles clip art images on 'animals with scarves or sweaters". They drew their animal in pencil, then, using a fine tip black marker, they added stippling for fur texture. they then coloured in the scarf/sweater using pencil crayons. They cut it out and glued it onto their background. I love how cute they came out!!

Cozy cuteness overload!