More Swimming Self Portraits!

 I first created this lesson around five years ago and it ended up becoming my most popular blog post!

 It's been a great project for exploring and experimenting with a variety of materials and techniques as well as getting students to create artworks based on familiar personal experiences, sensory expression and concepts of self.

I rarely repeat the same art projects over the years as I am always keen to try something new but after 5 years I had to revive this one for a batch of grade ones who were excited about swimming lessons. 

I also had to repost the project as I think that this time the kid's drawings are even cuter - I nearly died of cuteness.

You can see the original project HERE which also has details of the process. 

Karri Forests

Karri Forest photograph by Rachael Taft.

This lesson is a twist on the ever popular Birch Trees Art Lesson. I don't know the true origin of this lesson, but I got the idea from this lesson at Deep Space Sparkle. 

We don't have birch trees here in Western Australia, but  we do have the Karri, a eucalyptus tree which grows to around 90 metres tall and has a cream coloured bark. These Karri forest landscapes were created by students from Pre-Primary to grade 3.

Did you know 2011 is International Year of The Forest? Well, it is! Hug a tree!

Swimming Self Portraits

These are some of the gorgeous swimming self-portraits made by my grade ones, who are excited to be starting swimming lessons for the first time next week. We talked about what it looks and feels like to swim underwater in a pool and looked at some photos of other children swimming in a pool. The students then drew themselves using oil pastels. To get an underwater look, we then scrunched up the drawings and flattened them out again to create ripples in the paper. We used a blue dye sprinkled with salt for the background. This is the same technique I used for these Swimming Sea Turtles a few years ago. We then used plastic bottle lids to stamp blue and white circles on a piece of blue card for a bubbly picture frame.

Polar Landscapes

Here's another great little project inspired by That Artist Woman. I adapted Gail's polar bear project a little to suit my grade 6/7 class who are currently studying polar regions. See her post with instructions here.

My students painted a snowy landscape using cool colours in different tones before painting the sky with a blue edicol dye sprinkled with salt. We used a plastic lid dipped in white paint to stamp on a sun/moon shape in the sky whilst the dye was still wet.

Each student created their own polar bear stencil from thick card and once background work was dry, used white paint to stencil polar bears into the scene.