2nd Grade- BIRCH TREE LANDSCAPES!

 

 

Students at Roosevelt finished these beauties up on Tuesday!  Amvet students just started today, and will finish on 4/12! 

This is a 3-4 day art lesson (40 minute art classes).

The objective of this lesson is to create a LANDSCAPE painting, while students are introduced to, and gain an understanding of, FOREGROUND, MIDDLE GROUND, and BACKGROUND within artwork, as well as learn about the size/space relationship within those areas. Second graders looked at the artwork of Bev Doolittle for inspiration.

Students learned that objects in the FOREGROUND in artwork, are the things closest to us as viewers. Objects in the foreground should be drawn larger and lower on the page to show this.

Objects in the MIDDLE GROUND within artwork, are a little bit further away. Things in the middle ground should be drawn in the middle of the page and drawn smaller.

Objects in the background within artwork, are the furthest things away. These need to be drawn even smaller and higher up on the page.

DAY 1: After demonstrating, on a sheet of 12×18″ tagboard students drew one large tree in the foreground, then a line for a hill in the middle ground with two medium sized trees, then another hill line higher up on the page with three small trees for the background.

***Making any more trees than this amount on 12×18″ paper can make the landscape look too crowded, and would also be a lot more challenging to paint in the sky later on. 

Students then used the side of a piece of corrugated cardboard dipped into a little bit of black liquid tempera paint, to create the black lines within their birch trees (shown below). 

***Here, it’s important to take any excess paint off the cardboard after dipping, by tapping the length of the cardboard on the paper plate. Students simply scraped the cardboard from one edge of their tree to the other, and then repeated that step working their way up the tree. 1-2 branches were then added per tree by scraping thin, diagonal lines.

Paintings were then left to dry until the next week. Students could draw in their sketchbooks or read an art book for the remainder of DAY #1.

 

DAY 2:  Students drew grass blades and flowers using crayon in just the foreground (pressing hard!). We reviewed how things in the foreground are closest, and that our eyes can’t make out details of objects that are very far away.

Students then painted the land and sky with liquid watercolors, creating a crayon wax-resist! 

 

DAY 3:  Students drew 1-3 animals to add to their painting.

They each got a step-by-step, “how to draw” animals packet that I made to refer to (with multiple woodland animals to choose from–Fox, bunny, deer, squirrel, owl, skunk, racoon, horse etc.) and drew them on separate small pieces of 80# drawing paper.  Students could also choose not to draw from the packet and draw an animal of their choosing!

***I used to give students only packets of photocopied PHOTOS of animals to use as reference, but after teaching this lesson for a few years, Ive found that it’s more successful for kids to understand how to draw animals in this step-by-step way for this age group, and they enjoy doing it as well! 

Once drawn they colored their animals in with colored pencils, carefully cut them out and glued them onto their finished paintings with a glue stick to inhabit their wonderful birch tree landscapes!

 

Look at that cute itty bitty skunk!!! 

 

Students could also create their own animal!

The results are beautiful and I think students did such an incredible job!

What do YOU think? I’d LOVE to hear from you! Comments, questions, suggestions are all welcome! 

BE SURE TO CHECK BACK TOMORROW FOR MY NEXT POST!! 4TH GRADE AND 5TH GRADE ARTWORK! 

Thanks for stopping by!