Painted Cardinals

I found this lesson here:

Supplies:
• 12″ x 18″ white paper
• Blue metallic tempera paint (Michael’s craft store will have this paint)
• Pencil
• Black, red, yellow and white tempera paint
• Q-tips for snow


1.Look at pictures of cardinals. Talk about positive and negative space. (The cardinal and trees are positive, the sky is negative)
2. Explain however, that it’s not necessary to draw the entire body, just the head and neck area.
3. Draw the cardinal's head and neck, then branches behind him.
4. Add blue sparkle paint in the sky (negative), the beak yellow, add brown for the branches, paint the cardinal red, and last paint the black patch around the eye.

Week 2:
1. finish painting.
2. with a thin brush paint black outlines (or you could give the students sharpies)
3. Paint white dots for snow.

Sunset Silhouettes

These are great for fall. I found this on Deep Space Sparkle. I shopw 4th or 5th grade this video on positive and negative space: Positive and Negative Space.

1. We talk about what creates a silhouette.


2. Students wash a 9x12 inch piece of drawing paper.


3. Then they trace a ruler on all 4 side of the black paper to create a frame.


4. After that, they draw a landscape with pumpkins, bare trees, fences, grass, houses, etc.


5. Next they cut out the negative space (or background).


6. Finally they glue the black on top of the sunset colors.

Positive and Negative Space Name Art

Positive and Negative Space Name Art

This turned out to be a nice review of positive and negative space for my fifth graders. They began by making a grid on their papers using a ruler with different sized squares and rectangles (one space for each letter or number). Then the students drew the letters of their names using capital and lowercase letters that had to touch at least two sides of the spaces on the grid. If they wanted, they could also put the year or the year they were born. Finally, students colored in either the letter or the space around the letter with a marker and then erased all pencil lines left showing. The fifth graders were very proud of their abstract names.

Geo-Designs Positive and Negative space

Geo-Designs
I do this art project with my fourth graders to get them thinking about positive and negative space. They start by tracing geometric shapes on the paper using a marker. After the shapes are traced they color and add pattern to the shapes. The negative space is then filled in with a black and white pattern (stripes, checkerboard, stars...) using a Sharpie.