Unit Study: Plant Sun Prints

As part of our unit on plants, we made sun prints. First learners chose various plants that they wanted to work with. Then we placed them on the special paper, letting the sunlight "develop" the paper. The kids were super excited by the process and their results.

Step 1: Place plants on Sun Print paper and lay in sun.

Step 2: Let sunlight turn paper blue to white.

Step 3: Rinse paper in water.

Final process: All white paper turns blue, anything that was under shadow turns white.

Artist Study: Georgia O'Keeffe

 After doing the more traditional Georgia O'Keeffe flower paintings we looked at one of her more surreal paintings Ladder to the Moon. The class loved hearing about O'Keeffe's life, specifically how she would often climb a ladder at her New Mexico home and spend the night under the stars.

For this project we started by watercoloring a night sky using wet-on-wet technique. While it dried we made our textured paper by watercoloring or drawing in crayon or pastel on various shades of brown paper. Then we cut out the shapes of the mountains and ladder and glued them on. The final step was adding the moon and stars in white pastel.