Swimming Self Portraits

These are some of the gorgeous swimming self-portraits made by my grade ones, who are excited to be starting swimming lessons for the first time next week. We talked about what it looks and feels like to swim underwater in a pool and looked at some photos of other children swimming in a pool. The students then drew themselves using oil pastels. To get an underwater look, we then scrunched up the drawings and flattened them out again to create ripples in the paper. We used a blue dye sprinkled with salt for the background. This is the same technique I used for these Swimming Sea Turtles a few years ago. We then used plastic bottle lids to stamp blue and white circles on a piece of blue card for a bubbly picture frame.