Hidden Safari Picture

For our hidden safari picture, we started off by using a light blue pencil to draw any safari animal on a white piece of paper. We chose our safari animal from a packet that we received from our teacher. When we drew the animal, we drew it upside down and didn’t press very hard with the pencil. After we drew the animal, we took crayons using warm colors to draw different patterns over the animal drawing. I used yellow, orange, red, and magenta to draw four different patterns over the animal. After that, we mounted our white piece of paper onto a colored piece of paper.

 

The idea of drawing different patterns using warm colors over the animal drawing was because when you hold the picture up an arms length away, you didn’t want to be able to tell what animal that you drew or be able to see the picture. That’s why we also made red goggles/glasses using grafix clear lay film. We used these glasses to look at the pictures; we were able to see the animal clearly through the patterns when we used the glasses. It was really neat and fun!

 

An extension activity for this project could be to use this when talking about animals or life cycles of an animal during a science class. The students could pick a certain animal to draw as well as include some more information depending on what they are learning about them in science class. It’s a fun activity, especially when you get to use the glasses; kids really get into it and they think the glasses are “magical”.

Eric Karle Inspired Collages

For our Eric Karle Inspired Collages, we had to create a layout for a storybook that was based on the artwork by Eric Karle. We first had to choose a certain character and decide on the scene of a story. Then, we sketched the scene and character on a piece of 12x18 scratch paper.  

We created paste paper by taking a piece of white construction paper and mixing different colors and designs/textures on the piece of paper until the whole thing was covered. We let those colored paste papers dry. We used different colored paste papers to cut out the shapes of the character/scene from our scratch paper.

When all the shapes were cut out, we then laid them all down on a piece of construction paper and assembled our collage. After that, we had to glue all the pieces down. Finally, along with the character and scene on the piece of construction paper, we had to write a caption that would be on that page of the storybook!

I think a good extension activity for this would be to do something similar with the character and the scene. You could have your students choose any scene and character just like we did with this project. I do like the idea of doing a layout based on an artist but something different could be that the students could use pieces or strips from a magazine to put over the shapes of the character and scene. That would be really different and cool to see all of the colors and designs that you could come up with!