Snorkeling Self Portraits

Nothing says late autumn quite like snorkeling right? :) I wanted to do a self-portrait lesson, but decided to add a twist with my two groups of after-school students. I offered a template to create a head and from there the children (5-10) followed a directed line drawing lesson. A variety of media was offered to add color to their portraits, acrylic paint, oil pastels and chalk pastels. I encouraged them to outline everything with a permanent marker or oil pastel once complete to make everything pop. On a separate piece of board the children created an underwater effect with liquid watercolors and salt. (Always a crowd pleaser) Finally the children created bright colored tropical fish and played around with placement to create an underwater scene. Snorkelers and fish were cut out and glued to their backgrounds. 

Night Owls

 Alexa, 3rd grade

 Grace, 1st grade

 Jenna, 5th grade

 Luke, Kindergarten

 Sami, Kindergarten

 Lacie, 4th grade

Presley, Kindergarten

Choosing art lessons for a group of kids ranging in age from 5 to 10 can be a bit tricky. I think I made a good call with this project. The owls were created with Sharpie and chalk pastels on big dictionary pages. My mom had just donated our old family dictionary to me to use for art class.(How did she know this was so current?) The kids looked at me with a combination of wonder and suspicion when I told them that when I was young, rather than a computer or phone, we had to look up words we didn't know how to spell in a book. Ha! The backgrounds were created in the same way my other class had done flying bats: oil pastel moons, watercolor skies and acrylic branches. The owls were then cut out and glued to their nighttime skies.

Moonlit Bats

I haven't meant to be m.i.a. from blogging for several weeks. We put our computer in the shop 3 weeks ago and have yet to the get green light that it has been repaired. Enter my two wonderful brothers, who generously purchased a laptop for an early birthday gift. Thanks Dave and Scott!

The day before Halloween I had my new group of K-4th graders create these Egyptian Slit-Faced Bats using charcoal. The backgrounds were created with oil pastel moons, watercolor skies and acrylic branches. To add extra fine spooky branches they could use Sharpie as well. I gave the children several options for creating a spooky watercolor backdrop for their bats, (including a yellow, orange and gray dusk/dawn effect), but it was blue/black skies all around. The last touch was to use white chalk to add moonlit highlights on their tree branches.