Art in the style of Eric Carle

I love Eric Carle's artwork so I was delighted that my daughter also loves his books.

When I taught third grade, I always did an extensive Eric Carle unit at the end of the year. It provided us with something fun to do once the final report card grades had already been entered and no one wanted to do academics anyway because summer was almost there.

First we watched a video of Eric Carle at work,
then we spent three art sessions just exploring the different ways of painting shown on the video.


Next, the children drew a picture to go with the theme (once it was owls, another time it was trees).
They then had to decide which type of painting (thick, watercolor, scratched paint, splattered paint...) would work best for each part of the drawing.
They got to work painting all the papers they would need and once the papers were dry, they cut out the painted papers to glue onto their pencil drawing.

(my sample that I showed to the children -
unfortunately, I don't have any student samples, but believe me, they were stunning)

It was a time intensive project that involved a lot of thought on the part of these almost fourth graders, but they loved it.

My two year old certainly can't do this project yet
(she will one day I can assure you!)
but she loves to glue
so she glued tissue paper squares onto some cardstock.
I semi traced her hands,
cut out the hands
then she glued them (with my help) to a piece of paper to make a butterfly.
I cut out the body and the antenna and she glued those on as well.

It's the butterfly from The Very Hungry Caterpillar of course.
(Even though it's not the right colors!)
We're going to send him to the Butterfly Project at the Holocaust Museum in Houston.