1st & 2nd Grade Project: Tree of Life - Scratch Art

The 1st and 2nd grade both learned about Gustav Klimt and how he loved color.  So using Gustav and his love of color as our inspiration, we first covered our papers in crayon.  We then painted our paper completely black with tempera paint.

Below is a sample to show students what happens when you cover your crayon with black paint.

Once their painting was completed and our papers were ready, we used chalk to draw our 'Trees of Life'.

We then used our scratching tools to remove the black paint from the inside of our trees and the swirls of our trees' limbs.  Some of our students paint was too sticky to remove so they had difficulty with project, it was hard to watch them do so well for all the steps and then not get a satisfactory result.