3rd Grade Birch Trees

Im sure that you have seen some variation on this lesson floating around the internet but this one is a little bit different namely in students use of baby oil and oil pastels to create the foreground in their pictures.  Although these took us about 9 classes to finish I think they were well worth it, something that would look beautiful in a frame above the mantel.  The pictures below are a bit out of order as students experienced in full effect the concept of pacing and constantly being at a different point than the other people at your table.

oil pastels, tempera cakes and baby oil covered tables 

After trees were tapes off backgrounds had to be painted in either warm or cool colors, anyway they wanted 

Students worked meticulously to create the foregrounds using hundreds of little dots of oil pastels 

Once the background and foreground was finished we took off the tape to work on shadowed trees 

Students used q-tips and baby oil to smudge the pastels, my room smelled really good for a couple weeks 

Black ink was used for the outer rings and gray ink for the shadows 

Really striking results 

This lesson hit so many checks in the curriculum, foreground-middle-background, cool-warm colors, smudging oil pastels, masking of an area and painting, improving craft...the list goes on!