Friday, March 18, 2011

Eric Carle Inspired (and Friday Favorites)

Today our home school group met together to do a butterfly day... I was in charge of art! Eek! So I took my cues from Eric Carle, because frankly, his butterfly is awesome.

And the kids are already familiar with his artwork.

And I thought it'd be a good time to introduce them to some of his technique. Well, a modified version... because, I was working with 2-7 year olds and we only had 20 minutes in a rotation.

I started out by drawing out this guy and making copies of him.  Then I cut pieces of tissue paper so that the kids (for the most part) wouldn't need to deal with cutting paper. Next, I mixed 1 part white Elmer's glue to 1 part water.

Our technique was fairly simple. Paint on glue, apply tissue paper piece and then paint on more glue so everything is stuck down well. I encouraged layering but that depended a great deal on how long the child stayed focused on the project.

Here's Eliana's butterfly.

Here's Diego's.

And here's mine.

I had a lot of fun with this technique and think the layering and bright tissue paper made them really pretty.  I'll be saving my tissue paper scraps and we'll be doing this again around my house. It can easily be modified to take longer and be more challenging (especially for older children) by having them draw their own art with a sharpie and/or having them cut out their own shapes.

I love Eric Carle's books-- I think my favorite is The Very Grouchy Ladybug (because the whale gives her a well deserved attitude adjustment... don't we all need that occasionally?

What's your favorite Carle book?

1 comment:

Elisabeth Owens said...

Looks like fun Bethany! I'll have to try that sometime too.