Thursday, December 9, 2010

Audubon-Inspired Turkeys

Wild Turkeys I photographed while visiting the Konza Prairie.

I showed my 1st grade students a PowerPoint on James Audubon and we spent some time talking about his bird paintings (you can see every individual feather!)  We really focused on his Wild Turkey painting.  I love to talk about turkey facts with my students, a benefit of growing up in a hunting family!  The students know about the waddle but I like to point out the beard and spurs, too.  In my classes that had 2 sessions to make the project, I printed off and laminated photos of wild turkeys and put one copy of each photo at each table.  The students spent one class period drawing their turkeys realistically with the photos as reference.  We talked about pretending they were ornithologist-artists like Audubon.  The second session was spent adding color with colored pencil.  In my classes that only had 1 session, we did a follow the leader drawing so I could model looking at the lines and shapes, planning the composition, and adding details.







3 comments:

  1. These are fantastic! What detailed observations.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh my gosh. I just did a blog post on the same Audubon print! Just a different grade. http://snippetygibbet.blogspot.com/2010/12/its-party-week-for-audobon.html

    ReplyDelete
  3. These drawings are lovely. Someone must be projecting Audubon on art teacher brains today, because I just saw another Audubon post at http://snippetygibbet.blogspot.com/2010/12/its-party-week-for-audobon.html

    ReplyDelete