Hidden Picture Art

     We went on a safari! We made our own glasses from red film and construction paper that had the magic ability to see animals. Before actually creating our picture we watched a video on the lion king production on Broadway. We learned about warm and cool colors and how to make use of it in our project. We also practiced our upside down drawings. This helped us see the lines that make up the animal, and not the features. We then started drawing our animals in a cool blue. The color blue was really important, because we could distract the eye from the blue by using complement colors. We were instructed to constantly check our drawing with the red glasses just to make sure we could still see it. After we were finished with the warm pattern over top of our blue animal, we wrote three clues to see if the viewer could guess what our animal was. 

      An extension activity for this class could be still related to the safari theme. For an early childhood class or elementary classes they could go on a virtual safari. During this safari they could stop and talk about each animal they see. After this have them finger paint a picture of their favorite animal they encountered on the safari. For the older elementary students, they could write a small story about their experience in addition to the finger painting. I feel as though, students are never too old to finger paint. We could just talk about mixing colors to get different hues or shades of a primary color. 

The author Eric Carle was the inspiration of the next project.
Eric Carle is an amazing children's author and illustrator. 

This project took two parts. The first part was to take white construction paper and apply drops of paint on it. The goal was to mix primary colors to get different tints and hues throughout the paper. To apply the paint, we used a brush and pulled the paint across the paper while it blended with the other paint. After the paper was dry, we traced our design onto the painted paper of our choice. Then we cut our our design and glued it into place. 

I like this project but the entire time I was trying to think of away this project could be geared toward younger students. A way to accomplish this would be to give every student a white piece of paper. Then give each table a tray of white, black, and blue paint. Then have the student choose how light or dark they would like the blue to be. I would instruct the to cover the entire piece of paper. Then once the paper is dry, have the students think of things that are blue (examples: clouds, water, clothes, etc). I would have cut out cardboard piece of these examples. The student could trace them onto the blue paper and cut it out. This way they are working on finding different hues and tints of a certain color but also matching that color to something they know already.