Friday Art Feature

Well, it's definitely feeling like winter this week!  And with our newest art project proudly displayed, it's looking like winter in the classroom, too.  I LOVE how these turned out!  I found the idea on Artsonia - a virtual museum for kids' artwork.  What a fabulous idea!  I think I'm going to upload pics from one of our upcoming art projects on this site - how cool would the students think it is to have their artwork in a museum!!!

I've been wanting to try out the "bleeding tissue paper" for a while, so I decided to use the technique for our backgrounds for this project.  We wet our page with water first, then tore up little pieces of blue and purple tissue paper which we laid on our wet paper.  We then wet the page again.  We let the pages dry for the rest of the day.  The next morning we peeled off the tissue paper and were left this ... (the colours are a little more muted than I thought they would be - apparently the tissue paper in our supply room doesn't bleed as much as other types).

We then sketched our picture - they were to draw a close-up of tree branches with two to four cardinals sitting on the main branch.  I encouraged the students to make the branches as realistic as possible.  We used brown oil pastels to colour in the branches (paint would work well, but we were all out of brown paint).  We also did some shading with a black oil pastel.

We used acrylic paint for our cardinals and the snow.  For the snow, students dipped the end of the handle of their paint brush into the paint and dotted the page.  They added snow on the branches, as well as snowflakes falling from the sky.

Beautiful!

Happy Friday!!!  It's my youngest daughter's 4th birthday tomorrow, so I'm in party prep mode.  Can't wait to share some pictures of our "Candyland" party!!!  Have a FANTASTIC weekend!