Grant Wood Pumpkin Farms!

I found this unique lesson plan from Mrs. Knight's Smartest Artists!  She has a fantastic blog that I love to visit often! Check it out here.  We discussed the artist Grant Wood and looked at several of his rural landscape paintings.  We discussed depth and many of the elements of art, such as line, shapes, colors, space, and value.  We also learned how to show perspective and point of view just by placing objects in certain places on the page and making them smaller or larger.

First we drew our pumpkin farms together and traced over our pencil lines with permanent marker...

 Then I had students color only specific parts of the picture with crayons, encouraging them to color dark and heavy.  "COLOR IT LIKE YOU MEAN IT!"

Last we painted with an acrylic wash of three shades of green, one for each hillside and blue for the sky.