Saturday, May 5, 2012

Eric Carle Illustration Art

This is one of my favorite projects of the year.  Eric Carle is my favorite children's book author.  We visited the Eric Carle website to learn about his artistic style and techniques.  It's a very cool website because we got to see how he paints and plans his books.  We even got to see his new book, The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse.  It was inspired by Franz Marc's Blue Horse painting the Carle saw when he was young.  I told my students that you never know when something like seeing a painting can influence your whole life.

We started our project by painting a large background paper with blues, purples, and greens to represent the ocean.  Next, we each painted three smaller papers with lots of color, designs, and patterns.  These are the papers we used to make the ocean floor, the sea weed, the coral, the fish, and the main character of our illustration.  The final touch was adding some glitter to the fish scales.