First grade Cezanne's

The 3 choices that the students had for creating a Cezanne inspired project were:

Paper mache fruit- The students practiced drawing a variety of different fruits by looking at samples that I had bought at Hobby Lobby. They worked on getting the right shapes and making it large. Once they had their pictures ready, they uised newspaper and tape to create the basic form of the fruit/vegetable that they wanted to create. They covered this with colored tissue paper to make it look more realistic. I placed a variety of the fruits and veggies into baskets to create fruit bowls.

The second Cezanne-inspired project was a still-life. I placed a variety of objects on the still-life table and the showed the students how to draw them objects so that they were touching (not sitting next to each other). They traced these with black marker and then used color sticks to color them.

The last project that I had set up was a bluebonnet project. I had some bluebonnets that I had found at Hobby Lobby set up on the table. To help the students draw the flowers large, I created viewfinders for them. This helped them focus on the petals and the colors in the flowers. They drew the flowers on white paper and then traced them with black glue. Once the glue was dry, they used liquid watercolor to add the colors. I limited the colors that were in their pallette, by only giving them a variety of blues and greens.

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Fourth Grade Texas Wildflowers

Materials Needed

• 9 x 12 poster board
• pencils
• black glue
• watercolors/brushes
• newspaper
Other resources
The Legend of the Bluebonnet- Tomie de Paola
The Legend of the Indian Paintbrush- Tomie de Paola

Getting to Know series- Cezanne
Cezanne prints
Texas wildflower prints

My fourth graders read the books The Legend of the Bluebonnet and The Legend of the Indian Paintbrush, both by Tomie dePaola. When we finished, we looked at pictures of different Texas wildflowers. Using these pictures, they created their own still-life of Texas wildflowers. They started their still-life with a pencil drawing on a piece of white paper.

When they finished, they turned the paper over to the back and they colored on the back of the drawing with their pencil. It was really important to make sure the entire paper was covered in graphite.



They placed this on top of a piece of poster board, with the graphite touching the poster board. They used their pencil to trace over their original drawing, creating a graphite transfer onto the poster board.

Using black glue (I make this with school glue and black acrylic), they traced their lines. When the glue was dry, they used watercolors to paint their flowers. They used many different techniques to paint. They used wet-on-wet and dry brush. They used different values of the same color and made some of their own colors.

These turned out so stunning, that I used many of them for various shows throughout the year. Pin It