Galaxy Art

I am teaching a class for summer school called Adventures in Art.  I've been working with a different theme each week to keep it interesting.  This week's theme was Space.  I came up with this super fun project on the spot and the results were better than I imagined!!!  I divided the steps up so we could work on this over 3 days.

Day 1:  Students selected painted paper from our 'store'.  We had painted a TON of paper on our 1st day of summer school and have been using it for various projects.  The paper was sorted by color and placed on a bookshelf where students could 'shop' for paper pieces.

Students traced circles on the paper and cut out a variety of sizes to use as planets.  Students were asked to make at least 1 planet with rings.  We used glue stick to glue them down to a 12" x18" black construction paper.

Day 2: Students used chalk pastel to create galaxies in the black backgrounds.  We discussed ways to smudge the chalk so that it fades into the black background.  We used a variety of blues, pinks and purples to create the galaxies.  Then we discussed how to add shadows on the planets to create spheres using the black chalk pastel.  Some students had a sun in their pictures and others did not so that provided a unique opportunity to teach shadows with a light source.  Students who had suns in their pictures used yellow chalk pastel around their suns to create a glow effect.

Day 3: We added stars on the final day.  We looked at images from space and noticed that there were tons of tiny stars and a handful of larger stars in the images.  Students used toothpicks and white paint to create the tiny stars and cotton swabs to make the larger ones.  This step only took 20 minutes max so students worked on another small project afterwards.

Happy Creating!!!!!