The Grade 3/4 students are learning all about India this year as part of our Asia Literacy Program at Marlborough. We have enjoyed exploring the vibrant colours, patterns, jewels and embellishments that adorn the elephant procession in the city of Jaipur, during their Elephant Festival.
Over a 3 week period, we created our own Festive Elephants of India. First, we began by painting some papers in greys and whites and adding texture by using a variety of tools (scrapers, skewers, bubble wrap etc). While the papers dried, we practised drawing elephants in our Art journals.
We then traced the outline of our elephants (some students preferred to work with a template) onto our painted paper and cut them out. We glued them onto coloured card and were then able to start decorating!
We used green hessian to make the elephants' rugs/blankets, carefully pulling out a few strands to make the blankets frayed on the bottom. Then we adorned our elephants with jewels, sequins, pom-poms and a variety of bling! Adding lines, patterns and textures with oil pastels also proved quite popular.
To add even more decoration to our artwork, we used patterned scissors to cut strips of coloured paper to glue down as a border around our elephants. Mounting our artwork on black card and drawing a simple patterned border with oil pastels created our final touches. Well done Grade 3/4 - your elephants look amazing! What a colourful display they make up in the office!
