Today in class we made an art project called "Hidden Safari". Before you begin, you will want to decide on an animal to draw. Pick an animal that you would see if you were to go on a safari. I chose an elephant for mine. If you would like a reference picture, print an outline of your animal out.
To begin the activity, take your picture outline and turn in upside down. Now begin drawing your picture upside down, just like the outline in front of you. You heard me right, upside down! This will help you to better focus on the lines rather than the whole picture. You will want to draw the picture with a sky blue colored pencil and press lightly. You do not want your lines to be dark.
Once you have finished drawing your picture, get 3 warm colored crayons. You will use these to create the design that will hide your animal. Start with the yellow. Make any type of design you want, I chose triangles, and have them cover your entire paper. Then move onto orange with a different patter. Then finally do the same with the red. You will want to press harder with the crayons than you did with the colored pencil.
Now your animal is completely hidden so you will need to make glasses to find it! Use a piece of construction paper to make a superhero mask with the eye spots open. Take a piece of red film/plastic and place over the eye area. Glue it onto your construction paper. Don't put a lot of glue or it will squish all over your face when you use the glasses. Now look at your animal! Do you see it? You can also use a piece of card stock to write 3 clues about your animal. Don't forget to place it on a larger piece of construction paper to frame your work!
An extension activity would be to carry this over into science. This would be a great lesson to do when talking to students about animals who are camouflaged. Animals use camouflage to hid and protect themselves from others and you could explain how the art animals are hidden too.
This week we had to create our own picture that would be in a children's book. I chose to do an underwater scene with a sea turtle, coral, fish, and seaweed. To create this picture, we used the same technique Eric Carle does to create his books. First we took 12x18 sheets of paper and painted on them, covering the entire piece of paper. The paint we used had wallpaper paste added to it, and we made our paper damp before we painted. The only paint colors we were given were: red, yellow, blue, white, and black. We had to mix the colors from those to get the color we desired. Also, we could use anything to create texture to our picture. I used my hands to create the blue waves and a stamp to create the texture on the green for the turtle.
After we finished painting, we sketched what would be our drawing. After the paint was dry, we then began cutting our our pieces. We had to figure out what color we wanted each object to be, then laid our sketch over top, and cut it out using an Xacto knife. This took awhile and a lot of patients because you had to cut each individual piece out and then place it onto the background.
Once we had all the pieces cut and glued, we had to create a story line for our page. Mine says "Timothy the Turtle quickly swam back home."
An extension activity you could do with this lesson is an artist study on Eric Carle. You could read all of his books and talk about them. It would be fun to do this around the time of his birthday (like you do with Dr. Seuss). When you do it, you could focus on a specific book, like The Tiny Seed and have the students plant their own seeds. This way you are doing art, reading, and science! Also, you could use it as a way to talk about texture or just mixing colors and worrying about what you would use them for later.
