02 November - Crazy Animals

materials: magazine pictures of different animals

different colored construction paper

india ink and pen

glue

scissors

Discussion:

Tell kids that they will be creating crazy animals by cutting and pasting parts of different animals together. When artists create a single pictorial composition made by juxtaposing or superimposing many pictures or designs it is called a collage. Tell kids to think about what their new type of animal could be called, while they are creating it. What food does it eat? Tell they to give thought to what the animals habitat is. Review habitat: The area or environment where an animal normally lives. Dessert, water, outer space... Since these are crazy made-up animals they can be as crazy as they want with the habitat.

Tell the students when they are finished glueing their crazy animal to the paper, they will be using pen and ink to draw the habitat in the background. Demonstrate pen and ink techniques. Tell kids not to push down hard with the ink pen. You can demonstrate a few different types of lines:

A series of straight lines, all going in the same direction is called HATCHING.

As you can see, when you are hatching, the closer the lines are, the darker your object will appear. Hatching is often used when adding shadows to a picture drawn in pen. When using pen and ink spaces are never “colored in”

You can draw lines in opposite directions, criss-crossing them. This is called CROSS-HATCHING, and it’s also commonly used when shading.

You can draw lines going in the same direction again, though this time curve them. This is called CONTOUR HATCHING, and it’s

used when drawing curved objects to indicate the round shape, such as jars, balls, bowls, etc.

You can draw only dots, some close together, and some further apart. Notice that the ones close together create a darker appearance on the paper than the dots that are further apart. This technique is known as STIPPLING, and, though it can be time-consuming to create a large picture completely from dots, the results are beautiful.