Eric Carle Art

Last week, we had a blast reading many of the books written and/or illustrated by Eric Carle. He tells wonderful stories and many times explains his inspiration or gives a quick science lesson about the subject of his book. When we study Eric Carle, we can learn about everything from insects to endangered animals to telling time by the sun.  His art work is always interesting and unusual. Even the end papers in Eric Carle's books are beautiful!

  But the fun part is trying to create some art using his methods. His final product is a collage of the various paintings he has made, so using a variety of tools to give our paintings texture, we got started.

Some of the children took their ideas directly from some of Eric Carle's paintings while others just mixed and spread the paint  until they were content with their painting or until we told them they had to quit painting and let someone else have a turn. After the paintings had dried for a couple of days, we set to work cutting and gluing our very own collages.

We also made some tissue paper collages of Eric Carle's Very Hungry Caterpillar, as you can see at the top of the page. We got lots of good practice cutting and gluing during the week. But we also did other activities like hand print paintings of the lifecycle of a butterfly and planting some seeds like in The Tiny Seed.

 Another activity we did was based on on one of Eric Carle's lesser known stories, Hello Red Fox. This book is a fun interactive book that involves complementary colors and optical illusions. In the story, a frog invites his animal friends to his birthday party. Each animal is painted in its complementary color with a blank page next to it. If you stare at the picture for a few seconds you will see that object reflected on the blank page in the opposite color. 

 

We made our own optical illusions by folding a half of a white sheet of construction paper in half and gluing a green heart in the center of one side. When we stared long enough at the black dot we made in the center of the heart and shifted our gaze to the blank side we could see a faint red/pink heart. Some of the children had a hard time staring for 10 to 20 seconds but once they figured it out they were thrilled and amazed. Another fun week at preschool!