Rainbow Spider Webs

My Grade 3s created these happy little spiders in rainbow webs inspired by this activity on Artsonia by Gateway Elementary. This is a great activity for Halloween but one that kids enjoy any time of year.

They first learned to create a pattern using line to draw their web. Students then used coloured pencils, crayons and textas to colour the different areas inside their web. 

Once they had completed colouring their web students created their own spider by making a mini pompom. Making a mini pompom using a fork is a great little textile activity for this age group.

If you haven't seen this before you can see the instructions here at 'Jellyfish Prints'.

My students made spider legs from pipe cleaners and added googly eyes to complete. Students glued their spider to their web drawing. 

 

Castle and Sun

 

A few years back I did a collage project with year 1 students based on Paul Klee's 1928 painting 'The Castle and the Sun'. You can see my post on that project HERE.

'Castle and Sun'. Paul Klee. 1928.

I recently revisited this iconic panting with year 2 students. Students were asked to "build" their own castle using a pencil and ruler to draw stacked geometric shapes to create walls, towers, doors, windows etc. We began with orange paper and students then used oil pastel to colour the shapes individually before outlining their drawing with black pastel.

 

Rainforest Landscapes with Toucans

This lesson was inspired by the toucan drawings at Art with Mrs. Seitz. 

I wanted to reinforce some of the aspects of landscape painting such as foreground, midground, background, focal point and creating depth by overlapping. 

Students used pictures of toucans and rainforests as reference for their drawings. Once complete, students outlined in permanent marker, coloured in oil pastels and then used a wash of green edicol dye to complete. (Watercolour should work the same).

Easy Leaf Monoprints

 This is a simple mono-printing technique I learned in my childhood which I suddenly recalled this year and decided to try with my grade 2 students.

Students folded a piece of paper in half and thickly coloured one half of the page with various brightly coloured oil pastels. Once they had filled the page, I gave them a black crayon and asked them to colour over their coloured page as thickly as they could, aiming to have no colour showing through. This is the same technique one would use for scratch art. It seems to need to be black crayon and not oil pastel to work properly. 

We then folded the page in half again so that the coloured page was on the left side, inside.

I then had students make detailed observational line drawings from leaves we had previously collected from the school grounds. Once they had sketched the leaves lightly, students needed to ensure they had retraced all their lines in pencil, pressing hard so as to ensure the lines were being printed through on the inside of their page. 

Once they opened their page they now had their original drawing on the outside and a positive/negative mono-print of their drawings on the inside.

This is one of those fun projects where the kids can't predict the outcome and it seems like magic. It can also work with any drawing.