Cardinals Come Calling

Chalk Pastel Cardinals

January weather can be rather bleak at times, so at Brennan School we added some brightness to our hall bulletin boards with these cardinal art projects.
The idea I used for my grades 3 - 8 art classes came from Paint Night.  There aren't any written instructions at this site for this project, so we did the following:  We worked with chalk pastels on grey construction paper.  We first used our palest blue on its side to cover the entire background to get a greyish-blue winter sky effect.  Next, we select a medium blue pastel to create the trees in the background / distance and our darkest blue or purple for the tree branches in the foreground.  Lastly, we drew the cardinal and berries with our brightest red. 

Handprint Cardinals

After drawing and colouring tree branches with regular wax crayons, my grades one and two students used their hands to print (paint) cardinals onto the branches.  I found this idea at Mrs. P4s Art Room.

Salt Dough Cardinals

Finally, not to be outdone by the big kids, our kindergarten students created their birds on salt dough.  I used this Simple Salt Dough Recipe.  They had a great time first playing with their dough, kneading, rolling and shaping it.  Their final result - a personal touch, with their hand print. 

Advice from a Cardinal Poster & Bookmark

In my google search for cardinal projecta, I stumbled upon Advice from a Cardinal, a lovely image of a cardinal perched on a tree along with his advice.  I printed this out and displayed it with all of our projects.


I also used something similar to create  Valentine/Bookmarks which I gave to our students and staff for Valentine's Day.  My intent was to combine "I Love to Read", art and Valentine's Day and I believe it went over well.

SmArts 2014-15 Part 3

Chalk Pastels

Our final classes introduced students to the delightful realness and the great results of working with Chalk Pastels.   

 

Elephants and Dragon Flies

The younger student's chalk pastel project were a dragonfly and a baby elephant playing with a big ball.  
 






 


 The older class project was a large African scene featuring both an authentic adult African elephant and tree.  The pastel chalk medium lent itself to creating very believable skin for the elephants bringing them to life on both projects.  

Self Portraits

Janelle - Grade 1

After our first exposure to working with chalk pastels we moved on to pastel self portraits.   In hindsight this was a very advanced level project requiring many hours of one on one, hands on assistance, and in the end some fine tuning via the instructor with the student present.  

Daniel - Grade 1

The sum total of all efforts of students, Brennan School teachers and EA's were certainly worth it.  Our instructor, Carol Barbeau, felt that the basic lesson of bringing to life each student's image registered with each of the children at their individual level of learning.   

Joel - Grade 4

The lesson taught how very important details are. Students learned to seriously think about their own eye color and other details of their eyes, and the unique, individual shape of lips, head, ears, hair, the special shape and hair of eyebrows, skin tone, plus the simple few strokes that create their nose.

Nicole - Grade 6

Once completed, we framed the self portraits and the students presented them to their dads as Father's Day gifts.
























Thanks Carol for volunteering your time to spend several one-on-one classes with our students to see the projects to completion.  Also, I appreciate your input in this blog post!