My Eric Carle inspired paintings

In the fall I think I posted about our afterschool cousins art class we've done.  Basically Ethan's school doesn't have an art teacher so he doesn't get much art.  And I'm not that great at it, but Taylor's cousin has a degree in art, and 4 little boys of her own, so we started doing a weekly art class together.  The little ones play and then Ethan and her 2 oldest do a project.  One week she had them all print a picture of an animal off from the internet and bring it. 

I picked a ladybug, bunny, and a butterfly.

Then they talked about the different colors in the picture they'd printed and worked on mixing colors to make the right shade.  They painted strips of their mixed colors onto watercolor paper using just a basic set of watercolors.

Then sketched out their animal on another paper.

Cut up their colored strips into smaller, random shapes, and then started gluing them on to recreate their printed out animal.  This whole process in photos I actually just did in the past few weeks not while the boys were doing theirs.  But his cousin did a bunny rabbit and it was so adorable that I had the thought- if I have a girl I want to make some of these to put in her nursery.  And magically it IT a girl and I just couldn't NOT make some pictures.  I call them Eric Carle pictures because it's kind of the same way he illustrates his books.  And I LOVE his books.  I love the text and the pictures and I think they're just terribly clever.  So I don't mind copying some of his genius.

So here's my ladybug.  I had to do one since there's ladybugs in the bedding and they're kind of a cute girly insect.

And there's dragonflies in the bedding too but I liked a butterfly more.

And his cousin's bunny was so cute that even though it doesn't have any red or pink to really pull it in, I just couldn't pass it up.  So I created them all the same way painting strips of watercolors then cutting them and gluing them on to create the effect.

Then I modge podged them to keep the pieces all together and it actually added a nice sheen to them.  And then framed them.  you can't really tell but there's fun stripes on there.

And then hung them all in the baby's nursery.  I LOVE them!  And kind of nice to have something personal in her room.