Reflected canal houses

You need:

1. white drawing sheet A4 size
2. white crayons
3. watercolour paint
4. brushes
5. jar with water

Dutch canal houses are famous for their facades: stepped gable, neckgable, bell gable, clockgevel or spoutgable. Draw those five gables on the blackboard and discuss them. Search the internet for photographs of canal houses or let the students search them (search canal house or grachtenhuis).

Draw a line at 12 cm from the bottom of the sheet. Draw some low canal house with a white crayon. Draw windows, treps and doors in them. Paint every house with a different colour of watercolour paint. The crayon will resist the paint and become visible. Paint a simplified reflection of the house under the line. Paint water and air.

There's a ghost in my bedroom!

Made by Maarten, 11 years old

You need:

1. white drawing paper A5 size
2. indian ink
3. dip pen
4. pencil
5. paper towel
6. black paper for background

Help, there are ghosts in my bedroom! Behind the wardrobe, Achter de kast, under the bed, under the rug.... Sketch your room with a pencil: bed, wardrobe, toys, window, door. Draw ghosts on several places. Trace the drawing with indian ink. Leave the ghosts white, and fill the rest of the drawing in with various textures. Look for a lesson on texture at this link: Exercise in drawing texture. Paste the drawing on a black sheet.

Made by Floor, 11 years old

Fairytale castle

You need:

1. two soda bottles from o,5 liter
2. coloured construction paper A3 size
3. pricking needle
4. felt pricking mat
5. scissors
6. tempera paint
7. template with squares
8. stapler
9. stickers with fairy tale figures

The teacher draws battlements on top of the coloured sheets and cuts them (or leave this for the children). Draw a gate and some windows. Each child gets two sheets of coloured paper. Cut the battlements from both sheets if the teacher hasn't done this yet. Paint bricks on the castle walls with a template or stamp these bricks with a a square sponge.

Prick the gate from one of the two castle sheets. Be sure one side remans attached to the castle. Fold this gate to the outside. Prick the windows and fold them too. Paste stickers from fairytale figures in the windows and gate, or draw these fairytale figures.
Put two sodabottles on the table and staple the castle sheets around these bottles.

Fireworks over the city

Made by Oscar, 11 years old

You need:

1. white drawing paper A3 size
2. oil pastels
3. liquid water colour
4. brushes
5. coloured paper for background

Children draw a New Years eve in three sections: foreground, middleground and background. At the bottom of the sheet they draw a lot of backs of human heads; these are the people looking to the fireworks. In the middle they draw a street with houses. People are standing in front of those houses, so think about overlapping! The third section is above the houses: beautiful fireworks. Colour everything with oil pastels. Use bright colours for the fireworks, including white. Don't draw too many details, that isn't easy to colour because of the oilpastels. Whey ready, paint the whole drawing with dark liquid watercolour, because new years fireworks are at night! The oil pastels will resist the watercolour.

Dutch December skyline

The Dutch website juf Lisette has a lesson we do every year: the December skyline! 5 December is the day Sinterklaas visits all Dutch children to give them presents. You can read more about Sinterklaas and his Black Petes in the category Dutch folklore.

You need:

1. construction paper A4 size in dark blue, yellow and black
2. paperclips
3. scissors
4. knives
5. cutting blade
6. glue

Draw the skyline of a street on the black paper. Add a tree if you want to, or draw a black pete near the chimney.

Put the black sheet on the yellow one and attach them to each other with four paperclips. Cut out the skyline; you'll cut two sheets at the same time. When ready, remove the paperclips and cut some windows out of the black sheet.

Cut a moon out of the rest of the yellow sheet. Stick the black and yellow skyline together and shift the black sheet one millimeter to emerge the yellow one. Look carefully to the position of the moon: you'll see the yellow edges there were the moon shines. Glue the moon on the blue sheet and glue the skyline below. Your December skyline is finished!

Haunted houses

You need:

1. white drawing paper A4 size
2. tissue paper in two colours
3. brush and water
4. black markers
5. white chalk pastel
6. hairspray
7. black construction paper for background

Haunted houses…. there are many exciting stories in the internet to start this lesson! Discuss the characteristics of a haunted house: partly collapsed, on a quiet place, spider webs, torture tools, graves, bats, black cats, ghosts etc. The background is made with tissuepaper. Kids have to wet their white drawing sheet with a brush and water. Strips of torn tissue paper are put on this - the torn edges must be on the paper, not the straight ones. Make sure the tissue papers overlap a little, so no white paper is to be seen. When ready, wet the whole sheet again. Take a look under one of the tissue strips to see if the bleeding is ready. If so, take of the strips. Then wait till the sheet is completely dry. With a pencil, kids sketch a haunted house on their coloured sheet. They have to thing about the fact that everything has to be coloured in black, so they have to draw just contours. When sketching is ready, the drawing has to be traced with a black fineliner. Then everything has to be coloured with a black marker. Ghosts are drawn in and around the house using white chalk pastel. Fix the ghosts with hairspray and glue the artwork on a black background.

Made by students of 10-11 years old

Dutch canal houses

Made by Anne, 10 years old

You need:

1. white drawing paper A4 size
2. indian ink or fine black marker
3. dip pen

Dutch canal houses are famous for their facades: stepped gable, neckgable, bell gable, clockgevel or spoutgable. Draw those five gables on the blackboard and discuss them. earch the internet for photographs from canal houses or let the students search them (search canal house or grachtenhuis). Discuss the other features of canal houses: the stairs, the year, symmetry, windows, ornaments, shutters. Tell children to draw a line on their sheet about 5 cm from below. This is the canal. At the end you can glue all drawings together to get a long street full of canal houses. Sketch the houses lightly with a grey pencil. Indicate the places of windows, stairs, doors and shutters. Draw the houses with indian ink.

Newspaper city

By students from 10-11 years old

You need:

1. white drawing sheets A4 size
2. tempera paint
3. newspapers
4. scissors and glue
5. brushes
6. black paper for background

Paint a blue or grey blue sky on a white sheet with clouds in it. Use different colours of blue and grey. Cut some typical city center buildings in various forms out of newspaper. Paste them on a white sheet. In front of the high buildings we see smaller ones (overlap). Outline the buildings with black tempera paint. Paint windows and doors. Paint the sides black; think carefully about which side is really visible. Hang all artworks together to create a long street.

Just like James Rizzi

Houses in the style of James Rizzi, group work, grade 6

James Rizzi was born in 1950 in Brooklyn. He studied art in Florida (Gainesville), where he started experimenting with printing, painting and sculpting. Rizzi’s work often shows his birthplace New York. His paintings look sometimes childishly naive, with the bright colours and brilliant gaiety. In the art press Rizzi is often described as "Urban Primitive Artist '. Rizzi himself says he is influenced by Picasso, Klee and Dubuffet.

Show some paintings of Rizzi and discuss the characteristics:

• bright colours
• no gradations within colours
• evertything is outlined with a black marker
• houses have human faces/characteristics
• the artwork is full and busy
• background is full too

You need:

1. white drawing sheets A4 size cut lengthwise
2. markers
3. scissors and glue
4. blue cardboard A1 size for background

Students draw a house in Rizzi style, a house with human characteristics like cloths, limbs, eyes etc. It must be a house, that means students must not draw a square human being! This can be done by drawing basic elements of a house in any case, like windows, doors etc.
Colour the house with bright colour markers. Outline the details with black fine marker. Cut the house and outline it with a black marker. Draw things in the air: stars, a moon, globe, hot air balloon, ufo's etc. Look carefully at Rizzi's paintings to discover what he has made.
To make a group work, every student has to draw one house at least. Make a composition of all those houses and paste them on blue cardboard. Start pasting with the second row of houses, so the first row can be pasted overlapping the second one. Be sure you don't paste two houses with the same colours next to eachother.
Paste the stars and ufo's on the background.     

Rizzi houses group work, grade 5