"Winter Birch Trees" by 8th grade

      I found this lesson on Deep Space Sparkle blog a few years ago, and have been doing it with my 8th grade students ever since. Since then, I have seen many blogs do posts on the same project and I'm always interested in seeing how they do it. Often, teachers make small changes as they go and the project comes out a little different for each class.
     For example, this year, instead of leaving the snow area on their paper pure white, my students added a wash of the lightest purple watercolor we could make. We combined water with a few drops of purple liquid water color paint to achieve the super light color. I love the way it changed the overall look of the artwork. I did keep the tissue paper sky in the background, but one of my students missed class the week before, so I gave him some materials and said, "See what you can do!" His came out great!! You will be able to tell his apart from the others. It is the only one with a painted, solid blue sky. It makes me think I might need to create a spin-off lesson for another grade.
Here are some of the finished ones...