Britto Inspired Clovers

In a social media art group that I follow I saw a ton of projects around Valentine's Day inspired by Romero Britto.  I love Britto's artwork but I thought to myself, do I really need to do a heartsy fru fru project based on him?  The answer of course, no!  What's the next holiday coming up?  St. Patricks Day!  This is not a holiday that a lot of people do projects on and if they do they usually have rainbows and pots of gold.  Why not make it a colorful pattern filled piece of art!  So I found some short videos on YouTube that talked about Britto and showed his artwork.  I talked with my students about how he used patterns and colors to show happiness.  We talked about how we find those colors and patterns everywhere and how products now days push those colors and patterns because of how they make people feel.  We talked some about St. Patrick's Day and the real meaning of the holiday vs. the "American version" of the holiday, then we set out to create something different.  We decided on the iconic 4 leaf clover shape and went with a Britto inspired color/pattern pallet to it, purposely staying away from anything generic (green clover, rainbow, pots of gold, leprechauns).  This is what we came up with:

3rd-5th traced a clover shape, outlined and added patterns in sharpie, then colored with oil pastels.  Afterwards they cut it out and pasted it to black 9x9 inch paper.

Kinder-2nd used a clover printout, they colored and added patterns in crayon.  They also cut it out and pasted it to brown paper.  They then could design the brown paper how they wanted.  This picture is a clover that a Kinder student designed.  Unfortunately that Kinder student moved before finishing the project, so I finished it for him and used it as an example. 

If the students finished early, which some did, they got to use my new clipboard station for free draw!  They LOVE free draw, it is such a good early finisher reward.  and I always send them back to make corrections on their work if I feel they didn't put in the right amount of effort.  Some will try anything to finish early but they know I'll send them back if they do so it doesn't happen often. 

A good resource for this drawing center is the printouts I get from my Art Hub For Kids subscription.  I just print these out and laminate them and they're perfect for early finishers or a day of drawing centers!

I hope you enjoyed reading my post.  If you have suggestions or comments please leave a comment below!  Thanks for reading!