Animals Up Close

 

Grade level: 5    Tempera painting with technology element      3.5 sessions

This lesson focused on cropping a composition for a close-up point of view, as well as color mixing and visual texture - not to mention the beauty of nature and the majesty of animals!

Here, students are finding pics of animals and cropping them digitally, to use as observational drawing aids.

 

Next, once our thumbnail sketches and final designs were pencil drawn, we dove in to the tempera for our base layer, trying to mix colors for a more natural effect. The students wanted to do their details first, and to keep them on track, I gave them only larger brushes on the first painting day. The goal was to fill all the shapes and spaces with color, but no details or textures.

 

 

 

 

The next painting day, we had a drybrush and detailing demo and set to work creating visual textures.

 

 

Here are a few of our completed paintings - some are abstracted enough to really get your imaginations working!