Have you read the picture book, "Creepy Carrots", by Aaron Reynolds and illustrated by Peter Brown? My students absolutely love the artwork in this fun story about Jasper Rabbit and his love/fear of carrots. We were inspired by the illustrator, Peter Brown and created our collages.
I began this lesson by reading the story to my 1st grade artists. We looked closely at the artwork by the amazing Peter Brown. We noticed how he used black, white and grey to create the backgrounds and used orange for the carrots. It really made the carrots pop!
Next, we created the background landscape with black and gray construction paper plus white chalk.
I asked my students to create a white cloud with the chalk and rounded hill with gray paper.
Next we drew organic carrot shapes with our orange painted paper, cut them out and glued them to the background.
The next class we added fun facial features for our creepy carrots, carrot textures, and even Jasper Rabbit!
We had a blast creating these collages! We practiced our collage techniques of drawing, cutting, and gluing as well as visual story telling.
Wow, Summer has just been flying by! I have been busy recharging post wedding and school year. I have been doing a lot of mountain biking, gardening, baking, hiking, traveled to Alaska, rode my bike from Seattle to Portland, and have another bike tour in the works before we start the next school year.
I will be brief in my explanations but will be photo rich! If you have any questions about the processes, inspirations, or anything at all, please write a comment on this post and I'll be sure to respond.
I will say that one helpful tool to control the printmaking madness was using the Time Timer! Wow! This thing really saved me. I would always lose track of time before this I found this beauty. If you don't have one in your art room, I STRONGLY recommend getting one.
Ok...let us start with 3rd grade. We studied the contemporary British printmaker, David Jones. We focused on Jones' work where he creates linoleum cuts inspired by dreams. We began by looking deeply at this series to share interpretations of each print.
"The Acrobat is Alarmed by an Insect", David Jones
We then shared examples of our own dreams. We then made sketches of a personal dream on drawing paper. Their sketches had to communicate dream imagery and show 2-d texture.
After that we transferred those drawings to a piece of foam plate to prepare for printing. I flipped this lesson on printmaking for these classes, you can view it on my Youtube channel.
I limited the color scheme to blue or black ink but they could print on colored printer paper.
I even taught them about ghost printing (printing again without re-inking). They loved that!
We wrapped it up by writing stories about our prints, sharing those prints and our stories on my document camera, and doing a print exchange. We had a great time!
