Orcas and Harbor Seals

For this project, I was personally inspired by a summer trip to Victoria, BC, where I went whale watching.

I knew I wanted to my students to have some options so I thought about how to keep the materials (PAINT) slightly limited so that I could focus my instruction. For seatwork, everyone practiced drawing an Orca. For the project, students could choose between an orca and a harbor seal. The first day was all about drawing, and then painting with black paint.

Since we are landlocked by at least a 1,000 miles, my students don't have a lot of experience with marine animals. Students watched a video about Harbor Seals. http://www.blubberblog.org/index.html

**Please don't use this guide as a definitive 'how to draw a killer whale guide'....this one was hastily drawn on my whiteboard, and several students pointed out the inconsistencies with some of the body parts from step to step. But I erased it after two days so...eh.....Just google 'how to draw killer whales' for tons of great sources. I did not have a ton of photos for them to work from so I went with this method and it worked well.

I was inspired by the MaryMaking Blog: Breaching Orcas for the killer whale option.

The second day was devoted to painting the water. Students had to remember if they were doing a whale or a seal, because I suggested that they paint their seal laying on the beach....but if they were doing the whale, they definitely wouldn't want the beach because whales usually swim in very deep water. If they wanted land in the distance, I had some examples of this for them to reference. I made a demo video since this process involved a lot of paint mixing on the actual paper, and not on a pallet or in a cup.

I don't have any pictures of the painting process. It was WAY too wild to have my camera out! ;-)

Their favorite part of this day was the final step, when I SPRAYED watered down white paint on the wet painting to look like ocean spray. They pointed, I sprayed.

The third day was devoted to cutting out the harbor seal or the killer whale an attaching it to the painted background. This seems easy enough, but I did add one more element to the harbor seals....I allowed students to use water color paint to add some brown to their blubber, and use white paint for a little sparkle on the eye and whiskers. While I was passing out the papers, students watched a tribute to free willy.

The seals definitely had more personality than the whales. Since I did this project with 330+ 5th and 6th graders, there was a lot of room for individuality. I also demonstrated how to add a little bit of brown or gray watercolor to the seal's blubber if they didn't want it to be a snow white. Many of them did want this option. I also let them add white whiskers and a dot of white to the eyes for that sparkle.

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