Fairy Houses

This project was inspired by the series of books about Fairies and their homes by author/illustrator Tracy Kane.  If you haven't checked out her books, you really should.  They are just magical books. 

This project was completed over several class sessions and was done with Kindergarteners.  Really, though, I could see this easily being modified up for older grades. 

We started with painting sky and grass.  I also reviewed tints with them.  They were given white, green and blue and had to choose which to tint - the sky or the grass.  Most automatically tinted the sky because they wanted "sky blue" in their picture.

Yes, that's carpeting.  My art room had carpet. 

We'd run out of room on the drying rack and had to use the floor of the back closet to dry our paintings.

Day 2 of the project was painting the houses.  I put out trays of red, white and brown for them.  We painted Fly Amanitas (otherwise known as that red mushroom with the white spots which is so popularly used in fantasy art). 

I use Styrofoam lunch trays (5 bucks for 25 at WalMart) for paint trays.  Keeps the paint compartmentalized and when using limited color pallets it gives the kids a place to color mix. 

I let them decide how many "houses" they wanted to paint and how they arrange them.

We used the brown to paint windows and doors.

I freely admit to flaking on the pictures during fairy making days (it took two sessions).  My apologies on that.  We used multicultural papers for the bodies and then used wallpaper sample books for the fairy cloths and wings.  They got to decide how many fairies they wanted as well.  A few kids even added fairy dogs for their fairy families. Here's what the finished display looked like:

Absolutely adorable!