Artistic Freedom

Year three of Eric Carle painted paper animals for 2nd graders. I start with paper, and have the students paint that paper and scrape parts of it off. The next class, the students traced major body parts on the back of the painted paper. The students cut out pieces, and put together the animal like a puzzle. The students used oil pastels, construction paper crayons, and color sticks to add color to the faces and grass. We glued all of this on the all famous and controversial white paper background. We did elephants and BLUE horses last year, and a seahorse the year before. All three years, the students have enjoyed and learned something every step of this project. Hope all of you enjoy.

Tracers again…. But with that said, my main objective for this lesson was an introduction to tempera paint, cutting with scissors while turning the paper and not the scissors, and listening to directions and steps. After all is said and done, my objectives were met and the final product is very pleasing.  We started out by painting three different sized pieces of paper. The large one was colored with reds and orange crayons and the painted over the top with red paint and scratched. The medium sized paper was colored purple with crayons and then painted black and scratched. The smallest piece of paper was colored yellow with crayon and colored orange with paint and scratched. Students got tracers the next class and cut out the shapes for each piece.  The next class I handed each student a small piece of cardboard, and long narrow piece of white paper, and a paper plate with black paint. The students looked at some examples of birch trees and we ...

The Book My second graders learned about Eric Carle.  We looked at the book "The Artist Who Painted A Blue Horse." The book was a easy read, but does a great job of using warm and cool colors in contrasting fashion with each page. Most of the pictures have a warm colored animal and a cool colored ground or vis-versa. For the lesson we looked at two pages, the cover page with the horse and another page with an orange elephant. The students started out by coloring a 12x18 piece of paper with either warm colors or cool colors. Warm colors if they were doing the elephant, and cool colors if they were making the horse. The next class the students that used cool colored crayons used cool colored paint. The students painted over the entire paper and then used various scraping tools to at scratch and texture marks. The students love Eric Carle because of this scratching technique. The next class, I made multiple tracers for each animal......

I had the students put their seahorses in the box and then we shook brushes with different colors of paint on them against the sides of the box. The students had a great time and I love the splatter look on the seahorses. These are a sneak peak of my new Eric Carle "Mr. Seahorse" lesson. My students started by drawing seahorses using the whole paper. Once they finished the drawing we placed tissue paper on top of the drawing and I covered them in Modge-Podge. The next class the students had fun doing the splatter paint on top of them. Next week we will be cutting out the seahorses and placing them on a sheet of paper that the students have made to look like a underwater scene full of seaweed and air-bubbles made with a bubble solution and paint. The students loved blowing bubbles over their artwork (when the bubbles landed on the paper they left a small-large blue ring). Can't wait to show the final project all put together!