Picasso Animals with Construction Paper and Oil Pastels

This project is a great way for students to experiment with color and learn how to use oil pastels.  It is a versatile project because it is basic enough for our 3 and 4 year old artists to enjoy in art camp, but can also be modified to be challenging enough for an Art II or Art III class.  For our high school students, we asked them to choose a color scheme to use on the project.  Some of them needed a refresher on the different color schemes so they completed this worksheet first:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/18yqZ2h-_zpVEQkxnc7K_viMdL6Dmppy5E0gRyOkoA3A/edit?usp=sharing

We began this project with a Prezi on Picasso. You can view this Prezi here:  http://prezi.com/xu6wh5kvdloz/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy
This is the Picasso art we showed them for inspiration:

The students were then given a handout with some highlights about Picasso and the directions for the project.  This handout can be viewed here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/157Gsu-hPlVhOxq4odKQ4KnXKK7kqBE1HIpUH51oeiEE/edit?usp=sharing

The first step is to design a Picasso-style animal.  We have a class discussion about different elements Picasso uses in his artwork and how the students can use them in their art.  The students sketch their animal on scratch paper first.  Then the students use construction paper to lay down the basic parts of their animal.  The final step is using oil pastels to add details and dimension to their art.  For our Art I classes, we first demonstrated the following oil pastel techniques: blending, strokes, crosshatching, stippling, highlighting, and scratching.

And here are some of the amazing results!!!