Illustrate a Story Collage

For this lesson, we first watched a video clip showing how the successful Eric Karle creates his popular children's book illustrations.  His process includes making his own paper and cutting shapes out of this paper to create a collage.  These collages feature many layers and have a very unique look to them.  

In my collage, I made a scene that shows snail named Sid climbing up a tree as the sun sets in the background.  This was done by using two main pieces of pre-painted paper (sky and grass).  Then, using various pieces, I created the snail, tree, birds, and shrubbery.  

To create the painted paper used for the sky, I first applied water to the piece of white paper using my brush.  Then, I dripped red paint somewhat evenly over most of the page.  To add some tinting, I also distributed some black paint to the paper.  I used my fingers to mix the paint and spread it among the paper.  This was a very fun and easy process that allowed us to be creative.  Once my paper was completely covered and I was satisfied with the colors, I took a plate stencil and pressed it on top of the picture.  This gave the paper a snake-skin look to it.  

This process was repeated for the other pieces that I made, using various colors and texture techniques as needed.  When the paper was dry, I sketched my collage onto another white piece of paper to use as a stencil to cut out the painted paper.  These pieces were then glued onto a second piece of paper, layering shapes on top of each other.  

A way to incorporate this activity into a future classroom of mine would be to have students work independently or in pairs to create a children's story of their own.  They would need to write the text and design their pages before starting the process of making and cutting out the paper.  Once students finish each page, they could either write the text onto each page with a marker or print out a typed copy and glue that to the collage.