African Elephants with Watercolor Landscapes

Gorgeous Talia! 

If these look familiar, my blog header has an artwork from the same lesson I did a couple years ago. This was the second project from Day 1 of my Animals Around the World class. I gave the kids a variety of liquid watercolors to create a wet on wet sunrise or sunset landscape background. It's always fun to see how each child goes about this, some very methodical and others with reckless abandon. We put these up to dry and started on our elephant profiles. These were done on brown grocery bag paper. No longer free in these parts, but well worth the 10 cents. A couple months of shopping at Trader Joe's and voila! I like the texture of the paper to mimic the worn look of elephant skin. Children followed a direct line drawing lesson which was basic enough for even my youngest to follow. They were encouraged to add lots of wrinkles. A light coat of gray pastel was added and some charcoal shadows. Some kids chose to add black acrylic silhouettes to their background before profiles were cut out and glued. Off to different continents to create new creatures next week!