Charcoal Tiger

One of my 4th grade students is very talented, and has great discipline for practicing art on her own. She constantly draws still life drawings, as well as realistic drawings from photographs.

For Christmas, she received a very nice art set with lots of charcoal, pencils from 6H to 6B, pastels, various erasers, and other nice things. She was very excited to show me this set last week when we returned to school after Christmas break. She wasn't sure what everything was, so I spent about 20 minutes after school showing her how to use different kinds of charcoal, etc.

She had black, white and red charcoal (the kind used to create skin tones in life drawing). I explained to her that the reddish color was for skin, when drawing people, but then I had an idea. She had been drawing tigers since I gave her class my "draw the other half" worksheet months ago, and I think I printed her the complete set of wild cat faces 3 times to do on her own (because she asked).

So, I figured she could make a tiger with the black, white, and reddish hue. I gave her some charcoal paper someone had donated to my classroom, but that wasn't enough for a whole class, and I printed a color photo of a tiger for her. This is what she brought back this morning. Wow. I am one proud art teacher! Did I mention she's in 4th grade?