K/1st grade Skill Builder: Penguin Family Portrait

Students learned skills in multiple mediums as they created a penguin family portrait. A portrait is a picture of a person or a group of people. As artists, we can use animals to represent people, so we used penguins to represent each person in our family...and a few dogs because dogs are family too! We began creating snow using chalk pastels, blending cold colors and "fixing" them with hairspray so that the pastels stay on the paper. Then they used oil pastels for their penguin belly's, which is just like chalk pastels, except the colors are held together with oil. The oil creates a resist so that the body can be painted without covering up the bellies. We cut paper to create the beaks and feet, carefully gluing them on with tiny dots of glue. Some students added glitter to make it look even more snowy and magical!