Project: John Singer Sargent's Clouds

Gio's Clouds

Kids love cutting and pasting. Eamon especially is crazy about wielding a pair of scissors. So I try to find a lot of projects that involve both of these activities. John Singer Sargent's Clouds is a perfect painting to emulate in collage. It's a simple composition with many layers. 

Step One: Gather materials. You'll need glue sticks, scissors (decorative edge make it more fun), crayons in various shades of blue plus grey and white, blue paper, green paper, and white paper.

Step Two: Have kids color and draw on the blue paper with the crayons. This is to create a cloudy sky. We looked outside to observe some clouds and talk about the different shapes and colors we see in the sky. I explained that they can put some of those colors, shapes, and textures in their drawings with crayons. What really happened was a lot of haphazard scribbling and coloring which is really exactly what I expected!

Step Three: Have them cut a strip of green paper and glue it near the bottom of the paper. This is the land.

Eamon needed a little help cutting the land, but I tried to use whatever cuttings he had left.

Step Four: Cut out cloud shapes from the white paper. The decorative edge scissors give the clouds an uneven edge. Plus, the kids thought it looked cool!

Step Five: Glue the clouds onto the colored sky.

The new baby, Elsa, wanted in on the gluing. Maybe she can join us in a year or so!

The finished product!