Scarecrow Silhouettes

If you've been following me for awhile, you know I'm a sucker for sunsets and silhouettes. With my class I've done desert, wild west. and tropical sunsets. I've always used coffee filters and food coloring, but I wanted the scarecrow sunsets to be a bit bigger. We used regular watercolors to make ours this time and they are beautiful.

The kids painted back and forth over their paper using yellow, red and orange paint.

(Yes, I taped over the other colors. Was that wrong?) Before the paint had a chance to soak into the paper too much, I went over it with plain water to blend the colors.

This is something the kids could do themselves, but I was helping them out. I also noticed when we used regular white construction paper, the colors didn't blend very well. The paint soaked in really fast. Maybe we should have painted with water first, then used the water colors.

But for half of them, we used this paper:

I found it at Michaels. It was very easy to blend the paint colors using that paper.

I didn't have enough of either kind, so some kids used that and some used the regular construction paper. But anyway, back to the project. Once dry, the kids added on a scarecrow that I had cut from black construction paper. It was a little time consuming to cut out all the details, but I didn't need many.

I found the templates here and here. (I just copied the picture and saved it to my desktop, then printed it out in the size I wanted.) Once the scarecrow was on, they used black Sharpies (thin and regular) to make corn stalks in the field around the scarecrow. I told them to just make a straight line down and then add some curvy lines on each side coming out from the straight line. They did a great job!

You could use black tempera paint, too, but I think the pens give the children a little better control.

I had told them when they painted not to worry about going all the way to the edges of the paper because I was planning on framing them. But I regret that. I tried making a couple frames and it wasn't working well because each one had to be a different size depending on how much white was left on the sides. So I cropped them all to the size of a regular piece of paper and taped them to a piece of black construction paper.

A couple kids didn't understand the whole silhouette thing and drew faces on their scarecrows.

Still cute, though! Another regret I have is not making some sort of ground, like grass. It looks like the scarecrow is floating in midair. Oh well! I learn as I go!

I had three kids out sick today so I only have a small display of these :( But they sure are pretty to look at.