Silouette Landscape

Supplies:
Water colors
White Paper
Black Paper
Glue
Scissors

I recently saw these awesome sunset pictures hanging outside of Mr. Nelson's classroom.  Art volunteer, Meg Powell did these with his class, and I love them!  I found a similar lesson with instructions here.

It reminded me of the illustrations in one of my kid's favorite books, The Day the Babies Crawled Away by Peggy Rathman. 

(She also wrote Goodnight Gorilla, 10 Minutes till Bedtime, Office Buckle and Gloria.)

For our lesson last week with Mrs. Guerrero's class, I first read this book to the class and told them to play close attention to the illustrations.  Then we made our own landscape silouette pictures.

First, we painted the sunset with watercolors on white paper.  Since this was the week before Halloween, I had them stick to orange, purple, yellow and red to look more spookey.  However, this would be a really fun project any time of the year.  Rather than use spookey cutouts, you could do regular houses and trees.

While the watercolors were drying, I showed them how to draw some basic tree, moon, stars, gravestones, and bat shapes.  They practiced on scratch paper.  Then they drew their shapes on black paper with white crayon.  Next, they cut out the shapes.  Then we glued them on top of the watercolor when it was dry.

The results are really cool and somehow I accidently deleted all the pictures I took but this one!  (Argh!)