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SUMMER ART WEEK: COLISEUM ART AND A BUTTERFLY

I will admit, finding art projects that are appealing to both boys and girls is sometimes tricky.  I don’t always cater to the trickiness, because I think that both my boys and girl should be stretched in ways of creativity even if that means Sophie is creating a war scene diorama or the boys listen in on a story about an American Girl.  But since I do have the luxury of a relatively small classroom, I decided to let them each do projects that they would be interested in for day two of Art Week.  The boys combined their love of ancient history we just studied and created art from a drawing of the Coliseum and Sophia created the sweetest butterfly art you ever saw. 

All my kids loved studying ancient history this year.  You can read about our unit on Ancient Greece here.  For day two of Art Week, I gave the boys a Coliseum project.  First I had them sketch out a drawing of the Coliseum.  My kids can get easily frustrated with their so called “lack of drawing skills” (which is ridiculous, right!?!) so I made sure they knew it was their rendition of the Coliseum and was not supposed to be perfect.  They sketched them in pencil and went over with black Sharpie.

I love how they turned out. 
Noah added a 3-D effect with the shadowing in the windows, which I loved.

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This project was fun and a little unconventional.  Their Coliseum art was not meant to be your typical historical rendition of the landmark, but a modern twist.  They colored in their drawings with bright colors, which looked great against the black.

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Then for their backgrounds.  Using a large piece of black construction paper, they used oil pastels to draw lots of colorful fireworks all over the paper.

Then using a piece of cardstock, they folded two strips into box shapes to glue to the back of their Coliseum and then on to the paper.  The box made the building pop off the page, to create a 3-D effect.  I mean, how cool!!!

This is so you can see how it’s popping off the paper.

 
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For Sophia’s butterfly art, we used ideas from Jeanne Oliver’s Summer Art Camp for Kids.  I was amazed at Sophia’s creativity in this project.  It looks like something that could be the cover of a children’s book! She was very particular about what colors she wanted to use and how she wanted it to look.  I gave her general instructions but this is all hers.
 
 
She started by deco paging some piano music to the canvas and then scraping paint over it with a couple different blue colors.  She then made her wings using watercolors and watercolor paper.  I loved this part. 

She glued down the wings and the body with deco page.  Then she added accents with gel pens and charcoal pencil.  I adore her little butterfly’s face and antennae.  
 

 I love her little squiggles and hearts she added with pen.  She was so proud of her work.  This actually took us a couple days to finish with all the drying and other activities going on, but it was well worth the time.  I love it.

 


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