Halloween Art Ideas

Last year while teaching 3rd and 4th class, I wrote about a website I discovered called Artventurous, that had some excellent seasonal Art lesson ideas. I tried out the project called In a Dark, Dark Wood with my class and it turned out very well (I also really like her 3D Witch Faces project by the way!). Below you can see the Halloween haunted houses we made. The children had a great time colour mixing, making colours gradually darker to create this illuminated sky effect and then drawing on the houses and trees with markers.

We also created these crayon scrapings:

This was a very quick and simple art lesson. We coloured the background of our page in warm colours: red, orange and yellow. Then we coloured over the background with a black crayon. We then scraped Halloween pictures and patterns onto the page and the colours came out through the black layer.

We also made these Halloween masquerade masks from paper plates:

I really liked how each came out so differently and they really loved this project! We began by discussing what a masquerade ball is and why these masks are different to normal masks. I showed them this slideshow of pictures I had Googled:

and we discussed different ideas for creating their own masks. They then folded their mask in half and drew half of their mask's face, cut it out and opened it up to find a symmetrically shaped mask (some weaker children found this difficult and had to draw the whole shape with the plate opened up, meaning it wasn't perfectly symmetrical, but this was more manageable for them!). They were given different collage materials to use on their mask along with colouring pencils/crayons/etc. I added an elastic to some of the masks to wear around their heads and a long cocktail stick to the sides of others (depending on the design). 

This year in 5th Class, we are making these spooky houses using oil pastels and watercolours (You can mix normal poster paint with lots of water to create a similar effect). I really like the ease of the project, the bright colours and the lack of mess it creates. The idea and the picture below come from the blog: Art Teacher In LA. You can find all of the instructions on how to make them there!

http://artteacherinla.wordpress.com

You can check out her other simple and creative Halloween Art lesson ideas if you click here too. There are ideas for every age group.  I really like her Monster Collages and her Silhouette Acrylic Paintings in particular!

I hope you get some inspiration from some of these ideas and enjoy your mid term break.

(By the way, If you are an infant teacher and haven't already checked out my Halloween Themed Infant Lessons, check them out, you might get some good ideas for the last week of school!)