Lesson 5: Surreal Animal Paintings

For the fifth lesson I had my students do paintings of animals that might be in their fantasy world based on the surrealism movement. First I started the class by demonstrating how to play the game Exquisite Corpse. I showed my students how they will each get a piece of paper folded in 3 parts and demonstrated how they should be drawing something crazy and made up. The students seemed to be really into the demonstration and were laughing a lot at the parts of the Exquisite Corpse I was drawing. After the demonstration I handed them each a piece of paper folded in 3 parts and timed them 2 minutes to draw their section before passing it on. A couple of kids struggled a bit because they missed some of the demonstration from arriving late but I just helped explain it more during the process. At the end of the activity the kids were really excited to open up their papers and see their creatures and it overall was a great warm up for the lesson. Afterwards I went into explaining what the surrealism art movement was and showed them work from Salvador Dali as well as several other artists. Then I went on to explain how we will be creating surreal paintings of made up animals for this class. I proceeded to pass around 3 cups of which each had strips of paper with the name of an animal on it. One cup contained animals that could fly, one cup contained exotic animals, and the last cup contained more domesticated animals. Each student grabbed 3 separate strips of paper (one strip of paper from each cup) this way kids would be ensured a very mixed variety of animals. Then after all the kids got their 3 animals assigned to them I handed them an image that I had printed out of each of the animals, so they could reference the images if they were struggling with drawing the animals. I then told them to look at their animals and pick out the most descriptive characteristic from each animal, for example, an elephant is most known for their trunks. I then handed each student paper, pencil and an eraser for them to draw their animals with and continued to demonstrated on my own paper how I would draw an elephant mixed with a pelican mixed with a mouse using my printed image of those animals and picking out distinguishable characteristics from each animal. While students were drawing I did have several come up to me saying that they finished quite early so I would go over to where they were sitting and specifically point out characteristics of their animals from the printed images I provided and told them to try to incorporate more of those details in their drawings. When the students were fully finished drawing out their image I had them trace over it with permanent marker and then provided them with watercolor paints to paint it. In the end I think the kids enjoyed this lesson the most from any of the others, which is good because it means I am definitely improving with the way I am teaching them! I think what made the most difference with this project was providing the kids with more direction on what I wanted them to draw. I also think having the images of animals printed out definitely helped them picture what they wanted to draw. In the end I learned a lot by how I taught this lesson and will definitely approach my other lessons using similar techniques.