Chameleons in mixed medium

I'm developing a love for bleeding tissue paper this year.  Seems like each year I get stuck on some medium and explore it unreasonably.  This year it seems to be becoming project with that tissue paper.  Here is the latest, done quite successfully with first grade students.   They drew with a black crayon and then watercolor for the background and the little chameleon was glued on top.  This was a two week lesson.  I was really please with the results.  We also paired this with some factual information about Chameleons found in the book. 

Success or Failure??

student work

I wanted to attempt something a little different with first grade students this year to introduce them to warm and cool colors.  After surfing through some blog post and perusing Pinterest, I decided I wanted to try the bleeding tissue paper to create a background for a winter tree composition.  This would be similar to a project I have previously done with first grade but with a new twist.  I pre-cut squares and rectangles of the tissue paper in the warm colors and had students to cover their papers with any pattern they chose.  Meanwhile, another piece of paper was painted only used cool colors with watercolor paint.  Week two I supplied students with triangle tracers in a variety of sizes to use on the cool color paper.  They needed three trees in three different sizes.  When I peeled away the tissue paper from the warm color work, I was disappointed with the coverage or I should say lack of coverage.  I couldn't imagine how the project was going to turn out to be anything near to what I had envisioned in my planning.  Here are a few of the results.

student work

student work

I decided to shift my focus to perspective and introduced students to creating space in their composition.  They could overlap or use size to demonstrate the illusion of space. They began by drawing curved lines on the tissue painted paper to create three different lines in space.  We talked about the outline of mountains and imagined what that might look like.  Then students glued their trees, one on each of the different levels.  They were reminded to place the smallest tree in the background and the largest in the foreground.  They finished up by adding black crayon lines to create the trunks and the limbs of the trees.  This is definitely not what I anticipated this project would turn out to look like but I am really drawn to the abstract qualities of the work.  The goals and vision changed but I do feel like the project is a success.