Apple to Oregon Art

We have been a little behind on our artwork lately.  Natalie has moved into climbing, so my ability to focus on other tasks has been hampered.  This is a project I have been meaning to do for a while.  I got the idea from Splish Splash Splatter, but once we had time to do it, I could not find the original post.  So, here's how we did it - basically this is a lesson on perspective...well and history.  First we read Apples to Oregon (multiple times - since I planned to do this craft eons ago).  It is a (slightly) true account of a pioneer who brought fruit trees along with his family on their journey west. 

Step one:  watercolor ground and sky.  We let this dry overnight - mostly because that's all we could get done before our resident rock climber's nap was over.

Step Two:  Tree Trunks - I did an example (pictured below) showing them to draw larger trunks at the bottom, middle sized ones in the middle and tiny ones in the back, but...well at least we got tree trunks!

Step Three:  Leaves - I cut up a sponge to dab on the leaves, very nice effect I think.

Step Four: Apples - the end of a dum dum stick was the perfect size!

My sample trees.

Annalise's trees - She drew the middle row of trunks.  I helped her out on the other two rows, but she did all the rest herself. 

Caleb's Trees - can you tell he got bored with the craft after a while!  He really enjoyed dabbing on the leaves though, and I guess that's why the back trees got so huge :)

So I'm not sure how much we learned about creating perspective with artwork, but I think that is ok.  Kids know that things look smaller from farther away.  We put our Christmas tree up on Thanksgiving afternoon and a couple of days later I saw Caleb standing back from it, holding up his hand and squinting, "From here, our Christmas tree is as big as my hand!"