Laurel Burch Cats in Chalk Pastels

Laurel Burch Cat by a 5 year old in chalk pastels

The girls have been asking for more female "artists of the week" and when I came across the work of Laurel Burch she seemed the perfect artist to present to them.  Her work is colourful, cheerful and features wonderful creatures (mainly cats yet also underwater creatures, horses, and mythical creatures).  I was correct the children loved her style and oohed and ahhed at the pictures I showed them.  I decided to work in Chalk pastels this week as firstly it is one of my favourite mediums to work with, secondly its nice and messy (and most of the children in my class like mess) and finally we haven't worked with chalk pastels yet and my aim for this term was to expose the children to as many mediums as possible.  See my previous post on Mosaic Glass Suncatchers to read about the first half of this weeks class.

You will need:
Black paper
Chalk Pastels
Black Oil Pastel
Examples of Laurel Burch work
Fixative (optional)

How:
I like to offer the children the choice of doing their own drawing or following a guided drawing example.  This gives the children who don't really know where to start something to follow and it allows the ones that do the freedom to go ahead in their own creative style.  I handed out some simple steps on how to draw a cat that I found at the Rainbow Skies and Dragonflies website and then proceeded with a guided drawing example on the easel (I still need to purchase a whiteboard).  We drew the cats with black oil pastel and then coloured in with chalk pastels.  When the picture was finished we went over the black oil pastel a second time.  I sprayed the final pieces with fixative (mainly just because I had some) yet its not totally necessary.

Since it was our last class some of the children took their pictures home and some didn't finish since we also had a mosaic activity to start with (see my last post) so this is a small example of what they produced.  All the artwork below is produced by children who are 5-7 years old.

Here is our "Artist of the week" picture.





Cheers
Fiona