Wild animals in the jungle – inspired by popular Danish artist Hans Scherfig
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Here, the art students will take inspiration from Scherfig’s naive jungle animal scenes in a blue-green palette. After painting a base colour, they can draw and cut out a wild animal to stick onto the scene before painting a lush forest in a multitude of blue-green shades on top.
How to do it Download the templates/recipes
1 Prime the canvas with a good, high-viscosity student quality acrylic paint. Make a dark colour by blending black, cyan blue and a little white. Cover the whole canvas, including the sides.
2 All the students need to find and print out a photo of a wild animal. They should look for large animals such as a hippo, rhino, elephant or giraffe. Print or draw the animal in a size that matches the canvas.
3 Cut the animal out to make a stencil and use a permanent marker to trace it onto book cover foil (it can be helpful to stick the stencil down with masking tape to stop it from moving). Cut out the animal’s outline in the book cover foil.
4 Remove the paper from the back of the book cover foil and stick the transparent stencil of the animal on top of the dark painted background on the canvas, smoothing down the edges.
5 Show the children Hans Scherfig’s jungle paintings and give them a palette with two blue colours, primary yellow, white, ochre yellow and umbra brown.
6 Now, the students should paint a jungle on the canvas using as many different blue-green shades as possible.
7 Each student should choose their own method of applying the colour (painting in broad strokes, dabbing with a sponge, using leaves as stencils and colouring them in, painting palms and trees or something else entirely)
8 The jungle paintings should also cover the animal on the book cover foil.
9 Once the jungle is finished, the foil can be removed.
10 Finally, make any small adjustments you wish to add.
11 Give students inspiration for how to paint the jungle. The level of detail and difficulty can be varied according to age and level.
12 The book cover foil template technique also teaches children how to work with applying a wash to areas in a picture.
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