Penguin Art

We had a great time making these adorable penguin pictures this week. I found the idea on pinterest, but there wasn't a tutorial, so I thought I would give it a try and put my own spin on the project.   It takes quite a number of steps to make these, but they aren't difficult.  We managed to do them in one day.  We did the painting part in the morning as a center, and did the rest in the hour after lunch time.

Please excuse the photography in this post.  These were taken with my phone with no natural light!

Step 1: Assemble your materials.  You will need:

-background paper 8.5 by 11 or so (I used white card stock)

-white paper for bellies (half of a 8.5 paper for each person)

-black paper for bodies and wings

-strip of orange paper for beak and feet

-black sharpie (one that won't run if it gets wet)

-at least three shades of blue/purple paint

-paintbrush(es)

-scissors

-glue stick

-snowflake punches (optional)

Step 2: Draw gentle curved lines for a nearby hill and a faraway hill.  Your paper will then be divided into three sections.  One of the sections will be sky and two will be hills.  If your students need to, they can first draw with pencil and go over it with marker.  My first graders just went straight to the sharpie.  

Step 2: Paint each section a different shade of a cool color like blue or purple.  Encourage students to use a swirly brush motion for the sky section to add interest. Allow to dry.

Step 3: Using black construction paper, make the shapes for one large penguin and one small penguin.  We did them in elongated semi-circle shapes.  Semi-ovals?  :)  If you fold your 9 by 12 construction paper as I did below, you can get 2 large penguins and 4 small penguins out of one sheet.  If you need to save time, you can pre-cut the black penguin shapes for your students, or you can just give them the rectangles and instruct them to make their shapes as big as possible to fit their rectangle.  

Step 4: Cut the black penguin body shapes, and create wing shapes out of the leftover black paper.  

If you are pre-cutting the body shapes for your students, they won't have leftover paper to work with, so they will need a black rectangle to create their wing shapes.  

Step 5: Choose if you like the look of a crayon belly or a paper belly.  I prefer the paper.  Have the students create the shape by placing their black body over the white paper and tracing.  Then they just need to draw a smaller semi-circle shape inside and cut it out. 

 

Step 6: Glue the wings and belly pieces.

 

Step 7: Create beaks and feet out of orange paper, and draw eyes with the black sharpie. 

Step 8: Glue the penguins on, ensuring that the smaller penguin is behind, on the far away hill.  I told my students a little penguin story to talk about linear perspective to make sure they understood that we were trying to show that items of the same size appear to be different sizes when one is far away and one is close.  

If you have a snowflake punch, punch 6-8 snowflakes and then glue them all around.  It looks nice if at least one snowflake overlaps a penguin, but I didn't require it.  I try to not to be overly restrictive with things like this, since it's my students' art after all!  

Here are some lovely student samples: 

And here are some of them up on the bulletin board:

Have fun!  Let me know if you try this out and how it goes!

If you are studying penguins or other polar animals right now, but you know you will be doing more animal research with your students this year, try snapping up my Animal Research note-taking forms and report pages.  You can use them for any animal and get your students used to the format.  

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Animal-Research-1231323

Click on the picture to check it out.