Art club project #5- Klimt Tree Scratch Art

This was our last project and it took a couple of hour sessions to complete. I came across this project on another great blog and wanted to give it a go. The first stage was to cover our paper with a huge range of colour and organic shapes using a wax crayon. When the page was filled with solid colour we painted over the page with black tempera paint with a few drops of washing up liquid (this helps the scratching process when it's dry).

We looked at Klimt's "Tree of Life" and used that as inspiration to create our own.

We learnt how to draw basic trees by first creating a 'Y' shape and practised these on scrap paper. We then did a rough drawing lightly on our home-made scratch paper and used a mixture of compasses/tooth-picks/skewers to scratch over the pencil. Some children had create difficulty getting their colour to shine through. This may have been because their layer of paint was too thick or perhaps not enough washing up liquid was used. However, many pieces of work came out bea
utifully and they really come to life when held up next to a window.

They're so beautiful and it's a great project to do that isn't too tricky.

DB.