•|RL Arts: Audubon Society Poster Contest

I cannot express how wonderful it is to excite a class with a contest! The Santa Clara County Audubon Society is having a poster contest for their Environment Education Day 2012, and winners will have their artwork put in their 2013 calendar!
My 5th grade class was an excellent candidate for this project, as it is a small class, so I can deliver lots of one-on-one with the students. I chose to do the Red-Breasted Sapsucker, a local woodpecker in the Santa Clara County.

I painted a sample for us to work from and understand the process, as actually a couple of the students had never painted before!!! Couldn't express more how honored I was to be the gateway for his creativity. Painting brings a calmness to the mind as the fluidity of the medium brings much enjoyment to young, restless 5th graders.

We started with a pencil contour of the tree, then a pencil contour of the sapsucker. Stressing that the tail of a woodpecker always is braced on the tree, to prepare itself to repeatedly, knock its beak into the wood to make holes from which they extract sap, then lick it out with their tongue. The tail was an important factor in these preliminary steps.

I then showed them how you can make brown, from 2 complimentary colors - Blue and Orange, and how to find a "true brown" with those 2 colors (meaning you cannot see any blue nor orange anymore). Once we made our neutral brown, we painted our tree with this color. We then made a shade of brown (adding a dab of black), and a very light tint of this brown (adding lots of white). I supplied small 1"x 2" cut cardboard rectangles that we dipped the short edge into, first, the dark value, and second, the light value. They "scraped" and "texturized" their tree trunk (like a birch tree), enhancing the 3-dimensional form of the tree, as well as the enhancing the concept of "light source". Next we filled in the woodpecker with tempura.

DAY TWO, students mixed yellow and blue to make green, and tints of green for the background of our posters. This taught them about depth, and how color dissipates with distance.

We added the slogans, which they could choose their own, see below:

Castro Elementary School
Mountain View, California
The 6 posters I nominated for the contest are posted below.
(6 posters allowed per class)