Mixed Media Illustrations

I was very fortunate to have illustrator and children's author, Petr Horacek, visit my class again this year. Children of all ages love his stories and the wonderful pictures.

Petr explained how he uses mixed media, collage, drawing and printing to create his illustrations. He demonstrated how to mix different crayons to make the colours brighter and better, how to draw one of his characters (Elephant!), and how to create an illustration using collage. He also talked about how he develops his books and gets them published.

While Petr was with us, all of the children made their own 'Elephant' collages using their imaginations - what would Elephant look like jumping into a pool or dancing at a disco?

The next week we needed to make winter-themed art so we took our inspiration from more of Petr's pictures. The children made painted paper for the sky, sea and island/iceberg, painted the moon, drew and coloured animals with pencils or pastels, glued it all together and added the reflection with chalk for a final touch! They didn't turn out quite as I had anticipated but the children certainly learned a lot and, as you can see below, the pictures were quite cute.

I would definitely recommend Petr Horacek's books and a visit his website!

Notan Squares

Here's an idea I saw on a couple of other blogs, notably here at Dali's Moustache and here at Art with Mr Hall. We had done quite a lot of work on light and dark - tints and shades, adding tone - but this lesson was about balance and contrast of light and dark in the composition. We were also about to study light in science and it was a theme in our class novel - I love it when things all fit together!

This was also a great lesson for cutting and pasting skills... Some were able to go for more complex patterns (like the first example here), whereas others found it challenging enough to cut a simple shape from each side! I thought about using colour but decided in the end to stick with the stark contrast of the black and white.