Owl Coloring Books

A few weeks ago my classes drew owl art. We made simple line drawings that could be assembled into coloring books.

We looked at a variety of owl reference work that I  brought to class. I tell the kids that it is helpful for an artist to know how the real things look before drawing them. Also, looking at other people's art can spark ideas. We looked at a few coloring pages to give them ideas of what would be a good style for coloring.

The kids could draw an owl in any way they wanted to. I encouraged them to look at different references for ideas on position,  (wings up?, side view?, etc) composition (close up? full body?) and details (type of owl?, beak shape?, realistic or cartoonish?) of the owl they drew.

They dived right in and drew some wonderful owls. I took the rough drafts home and used a light table (cheap lap table from Amazon) to copy over their drawing with a thin black marker. Copies of each were made and I punched holes on one side. We assembled the coloring books in class and clipped them into inexpensive plastic folders.

This was a fun, successful project. The only thing I would do differently would be to leave about a 1/2" empty border around the edges of the papers before drawing. Copiers will not always pick up the whole page and so I had to do some after-printing line repair on some pictures.

These were done by 5/6/7th graders.

 These were done by 3/4th graders.

 Mrs. DG

Mrs. S