Van Gogh Inspired Collage

For this project, we learned about Vincent Van Gogh and his style of art.  We learned that he uses soft, wavy lines in his work so that's the concept we used in this artwork.  We cut out shapes and lines from tissue paper and used a white oil pastel crayon to draw on and around the tissue paper.  We then cut out a landscape pattern from a black piece of construction paper and glued that on top of the background.

One extension activity you could do with this project would be to create a painting project, but using short and small brush strokes like Van Gogh a lot of times used in his own work.  You could give the students a general landscape to paint, such as the sky or a body of water, and they would have to use short brush strokes to paint majority of the picture.
Example of Van Gogh's work to inspire students for this extension project:

Hidden Safari

This project we focused on warm and cool colors.  To start, we created a contour drawing of an animal by drawing it upside down.  We picked an animal that you'd typically see in a safari; I chose a zebra.  We drew our safari animal in a light blue color, and then over the top of the animal we drew lines and shapes in bright warm colors.  We created Ruby Red Glasses using red construction paper and a red film.  When you look through the red glasses it filters out the warm colors, so all you're left with is the cool light blue color, therefore showing your hidden animal.

An extension activity that can be done to teach students about warm and cool colors is to have the students start by tracing their hand on a piece of white paper.  Then, the students can draw straight, curvy or loopy lines all throughout the paper.  The students then can pick certain colors to use and color in the shapes, using a lot of different colors to fill the page.  The students should use cool colors on the outside of their hand, or in the background, and on the inside of their hand they should use warm colors.  This activity will help students differentiate between warm and cool colors, and help them remember if a color is warm or cool.

Example: