Isn’t this cool? It was a great “Fun Friday” activity to go with our Ancient Egypt unit. I found the project on Amy’s Early Bird Homeschool blog via Pinterest (and Amy got the idea from the Crayola website.). We followed Amy’s steps exactly:
1. Paint the background using tempera paints – orange, yellow and brown for the sand (textured with a toothbrush) and blue, red and purple for the sky. I think the colours are supposed to be more separated than this – our pyramids are at nearly nighttime, I think!
2. Cut out pyramids, palm trees etc from card and paint with watercolours for a muted effect.
3. Stick them on when all the paint’s dry.
4. If you like, add a camel or two cut from black card (we found this the most challenging part – camels are very curvy! But if you get the hump in roughly the right place they’re at least fairly easily identifiable!)
I’m so appreciative when people lay out the steps like Amy did in her post. Not being artistically experienced, I’m only just discovering the effects you get from different kinds of paint, like tempera, watercolour and acrylic. A year ago we only had kids’ washable paints, which still have their uses, but aren’t so good for painting [shoebox] Egyptian mummy coffins or [Model Magic] cartouches! It never would have occurred to me to use two different types of paint in one picture. I’ve also invested in some heavier weight paper – before that everything was sloshed onto copy paper.
It’s very exciting to think of all the other fun arty stuff we have yet to play with!
