Surreal Landscape Collage

Hello fifth graders and art fans... here's a little lesson on "surreal" art.  What is surreal art?  It is a specific style of art which portrays sort of a dream world.  What I mean by this is that, while some things might look right or might appear to be realistic, other parts are out of the ordinary.  You can learn more about Surrealism here .  You may also want to check out this cartoon all about surrealist artist Rene Magritte.

Here's a little example of the sort of thing you'll be creating today.  We will focus in here on how to correctly draw a landscape, using scale to show distance.  After all, part of making surreal art is creating parts that do look REAL.

You may notice that some of the things in my picture are cut from a magazine.  If you don't have one at home you can use a newspaper, or just skip this part, but it is pretty fun to go on a hunt for interesting pictures to incorporate in your art.

Now, back to that landscape....First we need a horizon line (a line that separates the sky from the ground).  This could be high or low on your paper, but mine is right around the middle, so I have plenty of room for things in the sky AND on the ground.

I decided to add a moon in this one.  I want to remind you that you don't have to do that and you definitely don't need to put a sun with lines up in the corner :)  It is a habit for many people to do this, but the sun or moon could be anywhere, even behind a cloud!  You might notice my path looks like it is bigger on the bottom of my paper.  

In fact, EVERYTHING gets smaller as you get closer to that horizon line.  That's because as things get further from us, they appear to be smaller, and the horizon line marks the point where we can no longer see what's out there. Not sure what I mean?  Go take a look outside, and see how far your eyes can see....at some point do things "disappear"?  Do trees look smaller when they are further away?

Once you've got your landscape drawn in (leave some space for your "weird" magazine parts), go ahead and shade or color it in, and paste in two or three little  things you've found.  One thing that can make it look more interesting is if you choose something that doesn't quite match your theme of your work.  For instance, if I had drawn an ocean scene and then stuck house under the water... Or if I had drawn a forest full of fish.  Have fun! The sky's the limit :)