Art class in Ulsan: Eric Carle Style Illustrations

As stated previously, Korean students study ALL the time. Even during break they go to academy or sign up for extra classes at their school. For me this has resulted in the wonderful benefit of an art class. (See Art class in Ulsan for pictures and information about the winter art class with four boys.)

The summer art class has taken a different turn entirely. This is partly due to higher expectations of the students involved and partly due to their longer attention spans and increased patience. What started as a seemingly simple idea to create books, has evolved into a full out course on Eric Carle style illustrations.

With the help of Eric Carle's website and a slideshow on his books, I introduced my students to the concept of creating illustrations and making stories in the style of Eric Carle. We did not have access to his actual books. Yet it all worked out for the best.

Based on Carle's illustrations, I had the students brainstorm and discuss what they thought the stories were about. I discovered that this opened a door to the creative process. They couldn't copy the stories because the stories weren't there to copy! Many students, especially studious Korean girls, want to do everything "perfectly", but in art nothing is right or wrong. Not having an "answer" available created a bit of confusion at first, but they have begun an awesome journey toward original stories.

After the students decided on a main character and worked on their stories a bit, we painted tissue paper.

The students were a bit surprised at what happened to the table underneath their tissue paper, but it was easily wiped off.

At home, I was lazy and didn't wipe between each piece of tissue paper. This is the result.

Unfortunately the time allowed in class for painting tissue paper wasn't quite enough, so I went home and painted MORE tissue paper because of our time constraints.