Do you see what I see?

Description: 

For this hidden safari art lesson we learned about the artist Henri Rousseau. He was famous for detailed paintings of jungles. 

We started the project by creating special glasses to see our hidden art. The glasses use a red film to filter out specific colors.  

We then chose an animal to draw using the "upside down" technique, another visual trick! This technique helps students practice recognizing shapes and lines in a subject. I chose to draw an elephant, my grandmother's favorite animal. The next step is to add patterns over the animal drawing so the animal is "hidden". My pattern included large leaves with flowers to keep with the jungle theme. 

The elephant was drawn with a blue pencil that can be seen when looking through the special glasses, but is still hidden in the warm tones that used to make the patterns. 

We also included three written clues about our hidden animal on the page. 

As you can tell from the photos, the blue sketched elephant is very hard to see without the special red filmed glasses. A fun visual trick! 

Extension: 

This art lesson could be incorporated into an ice-breaker activity at the beginning of the year. Students could answer a question about themselves, and the answer is hidden behind the patterns. Students would then make a guess to what hidden answer is. 

Example: Carrie's favorite type of desert is the hint written on the front of the page, the hidden message is a drawing of an ice cream cone.