Rousseau Rainforests

Inspiration: The jungle paintings of French painter Henri Rousseau (1844-1910).

 This lesson was intended to teach students how to create a landscape drawing which implies depth using foreground, mid-ground and background. Much like Rousseau himself, students used plant life around the school grounds and pictures of rainforests and animals to inspire their drawings. They were asked to have an animal as their focal point and to use a variety of line types to show different plant life. They then used watercolour pencils to add colour and outlined in a black marker once painting was complete. I was impressed with how hard they all worked on these, particularly the grade threes.