Chinese Style Scroll Paintings

The idea for these Chinese inspired plum blossom scrolls came from V.K Bowerman's Flickr photostream featuring many interesting art room projects.

For my version of this project, grade 4 students were given a long strip of paper onto which they traced jar lids to make a circle representing the sun or the moon in the sky. Each student chose a colour to paint their background.
Once dry, the branches of the plum tree were created using black ink and straw blowing - similar to this project. Once the ink was dry the plum blossoms were drawn with chalk pastel and fineliner.

I am fortunate to have a great many amazing students at my school who are fluent in Chinese languages as well as English. These students were able to decorate their scrolls with their name in Chinese characters and helped to translate other student's names for them. I also downloaded Chinese translations of many student's names online.

To complete, we glued cut pieces of wooden skewers to the top and bottom of our scrolls and tied a piece of string to the top for a hanger.