3rd Grade Patterned Tree Silhouettes

These silhouettes are just beautiful. I found inspiration for this project on flikr. As beautiful as they are, next year, I will give them a smaller paint brush for the trees.We used black oil pastel to draw the lines for the background and then painted with warm colors. I added some gold and bronze to their paint palette and am so glad I did! It really puts these on another level. :)

For the trees, we studied different types of trees and tree silhouettes. I demonstrated on how to draw a simple Y tree and also Klimt's curly trees. One student came up with the idea of scraping into the ground (while the paint is still wet) to make designs or roots. What a wonderful idea! I love when they speak up on their ideas! I encouraged them to add details like birds, grass, swings, tree houses and to fill up the space on the paper.