Eric Carle Collage

This week we were inspired by Eric Carle. We started by watching a video of how he creates his books. He starts by painting his own colored papers using many different techniques. As those are drying, he draws out a scene for his books. He then places the scene he just drew on top of the colored papers he painted. He uses an Exacto knife to cut out the different pieces and then uses the original drawing paper as a template of where that piece goes on a blank sheet of white paper. I thought the video was very interesting and would be a great way for kids to get inspired and motivated to create their own collage.

After the video was done, we were able to create our own colored papers. We got 12x18 sheets of paper along with red, blue, yellow, white and, black paint. We were then instructed to create our own colors in which we could use to paint our own papers. We could also use many different textures in our painting. We had to paint the paper with water first and then we added the paint. I started out by making a purple which you can see ended up becoming the background to my picture. I also painted a sheet of paper brown to make the owl shown above. As we let the papers dry, we began sketching what our scene would look like.

Once our sketch was finished and the papers were dry, we were able to start creating our scene. To start the process, we cut out the pieces of our scene using an Exacto knife. Then we placed those pieces over the colored paper that we wanted to use and then cut them out. This step took a lot of patience because we had to cut each piece out of the template and then cut it out of what color we wanted.

We then placed the pieces where we wanted them on our white sheets of paper and glued them on when we liked where they were. Once they were all glued the scene was almost complete! I also added oil pastel stars and a fence post to my collage. The last step was to add a sentence to our scene. My story was about Timothy the Owl. The sentence I chose was, "Timothy the Owl was in charge of watching over the night sky."

There are many different ways to extend this activity. I would do a whole Eric Carle unit in which we would read a lot of his books and do different activities with them. For The Hungry Caterpillar, we could collect caterpillars and watch them turn into butterflies in the classroom as a science activity. We could also read,  The Little Cloud, and talk about different clouds that we see. We could create a cloud scope in which students can hold it up to the sky and see what type of cloud they are looking at. This would also we a science activity.