Jungle Artworks Inspired by Rousseau

     I love Henri Rousseau and it's been a few years since I've done a project about him, so I thought it was about time!  In fourth grade at Suffield, we talked about Rousseau and how he would sometimes look at plants and trees that were accessible to him in France and make changes to them to make them look like they belonged in a jungle.  We learned about the parts of a landscape and then looked at and drew house plants.  The kids altered the scale of the plants to place them in the various parts of their landscapes.  

     They traced their jungle landscapes with charcoal pencils and colored with watercolor pencils and crayons.  After painting water over the watercolor media, they drew jungle animals on other paper and used 3D Dots to attach them to their landscapes.  The kids really liked doing all the different media steps involved with this project!  

     You can see that we used manila colored drawing paper for the landscapes. This is NOT traditional manila paper.  Watercolor crayons and pencils won't work as nicely on manila paper.  We did this so that the animals would pop even more on their white paper.

Eric Carle Inspired Collages from Suffield and Brimfield

     I don't often do the same projects at both Suffield and Brimfield because I like to do different things!  This one was so successful, though, that I really did enjoy doing it with both schools' first graders.  I love Eric Carle and have tried various lessons based on him over the years.  I often find his process difficult for kids to do well, but this lesson went very smoothly.

     We read 10 Little Rubber Ducks by Eric Carle and talked a lot about his process to create his collages.  The kids started by collaging tissue paper with liquid starch onto cool colored pieces of construction paper for the water backgrounds. 

     The kids then used cake tempera to paint on top of their collages in places to really make it look like an ocean and a sky.

     We then painted various yellow and orange colors of tempera paint onto warm colored construction paper for our ducks.  I showed the kids a sgraffito technique using the opposite end of their brushes, and they really liked experimenting with that.

     I don't have any photos of the kids drawing their ducks, but I modeled the steps on my white board and they drew with me on the backs of their painted yellow/orange papers.  They then cut the ducks out and used either oil pastels or colored Sharpies to give the ducks their features.  In the future, I might stick with just the oil pastels.  Some of the kids used them additionally on their backgrounds and the results were really nice.