Winter Cityscapes

Students in grades 4-6 created these lovely winter cityscapes as an exploration into architecture, value and shading! We began by creating a unique cityscape- drawing homes or buildings and adding detailed architectural elements. These were drawn in pencil and then traced over with sharpie. For the background, I let students choose a color of paint and then create a gradient sky. We talked about the art element of value- the lightness or darkness of a color. Adding white to a color is called a tint and adding black to a color is called a shade. Students were to mix the colors and create a minimum of 5 different values in their sky. The final step was to cut out the cityscape and attach it to the value painting. We also used oil pastels in the same color to create some shadows on the buildings and white paint to add snowflakes.