Elephants, elephants, elephants

One of my all time favorite art lessons this year has been these Indian elephants.

In Jaipur, India there is a tradition of painting elephants as part of celebrations.  The elephant is considered a divine animal and in the Hindu belief there is an elephant head deity named Ganesha.  Elephants are worshiped and showered with color, paint, fabric, jewels, anklets, scarves and even toe nail polish during celebrations...yikes.

Using guided drawing, the basic shapes of the elephants were sketch by students on to 9x12 construction paper with pencil.   Lines were then traced with sharpies and color added with pastels. Borders added then mounted on 9x12 construction paper.

The project was done at two separate schools by kindergartens, first, second and third graders. Yup you can believe it!

 At the other school students created an background environment on separate paper using water color or any medium of their choice.  Elephants were cut out and glued onto the environments.  At the other school students drew their borders. 

Some students preferred to draw directly onto the grey construction paper  and color with oil pastels. (shown below)

Tags:  elephants, India, children art, art, paintings of elephants, pastels, watercolor

You can see a wonderful and similar project at the following link:  http://paintedpaperintheartroom.blogspot.com/2010/10/festival-elephants-of-india.html