We began this project by looking at Paul Klee’s painting, “Picture Album”. We looked at the painting in a book called Art Start Very First Art books for Children by Ernest Raboff. In the book Raboff calls the painting “a sheet of pictures”, and says it looks like both a treasure hunting game and an ancient stone carving. As a class they searched for all the “treasures” in Klee’s painting, and then made a list of treasures that they would like to include in their “carving”. Klee used paint to make his painting, but I had the children use layers of craypas. I wanted them to have the sensation of actually carving into it, so I sanded popsicle sticks to have a point, and the children carved out their treasures, revealing the black paper underneath. They had free choice of what they included in their art, my only stipulation for them was to include the “red sun” as seen in Klee’s painting. The results are colorful, whimsical, and personal to each child.
