Antler Animals in Silhouette

This is a Canadian 'animals with antlers' project that was proposed to me by the Grade 5 Social Studies teacher at mu school. He wanted a display for his classroom as well as making a contest whereby students have to guess which animal is which. 

So students started off by painting a sky background using liquid watercolours on heavy 9 x 12" white paper. I demonstrated the 'wet-on-wet' technique so the colours would blend together. 

This took one 40 minute class.

The next class, students chose from handouts I made of various Canadian animals that have antlers: elk, caribou, whitetail deer, bison and moose. 

Lemme tell you that 85% of the class chose deer and  only one kid chose the poor bison!!

So I had the kids do a practice drawing first just to get the proportions correct. 

Then they sketched it onto their painted background and including some naturalistic looking grass.

Then they painted it all in using black tempera- I demonstrated how to outline the animal 

and grass first with a thin brush and then fill in the rest with a larger brush. 

Some Grade 5 results!