5th Grade Jungles! Mixed Media Reductive Printmaking with Oil Pastel and Paint!

One of the big projects this year for our 5th graders is to make a reductive print.  I'm never totally happy how these come out, and this year I decided to walk back to the beginning of my career, when I tackled jobs that were huge and unwieldy and sucked all the air out of my body.  I pulled out a lesson about Henri Rousseau; students would print a jungle background, research jungle plants and animals, draw both on different pieces of paper, paint and embellish with oil pastel, and then make them into bas relief layers by putting rolls of paper beneath each level.  It was kinda cool to see it all come together.  Took a while but the kids loved it.  Nearly everyone said that they never dreamed that the pieces would come together to look as good as they did--lots of pride in their work!

First, we talked about Rousseau--that he was self-taught, worked as a customs agent, and that he told people he fought in the jungles of Mexico, and saw all these wild animals.  In reality, he spent a lot of time at the botanical gardens sketching plants, and at the zoo, sketching the animals.

The plants and animals that show up in his paintings are sometimes incongruous with where they live in actuality, and size is a decision made with artistic license (personally, I just want to see a guy riding a tiger, playing the ukulele, in real life).

Beginning with a reductive print, students followed up with an underpainting for their background.

 Adding the background features helped to show depth.

Students followed their underpaintings with oil pastel embellishments on the background.

   Looking at real jungle plants, they drew, painted, and then applied 

oil pastel on strips of  paper that later would be cut out  and used as a first layer. 

Testing out the look of the animal on the background, before assembly

The finished products were amazing.  Students cut 1/2 " strips of paper and rolled them around a marker to make rolls to place in between layers.  They situated their plants and then decided where their animals would go.  Like Rousseau, some of them took artistic license and made animals that don't actually live in the jungle.  

The results were pretty exciting.