3rd Grade Oil Pastel Jellyfish

As my 3rd grade students are beginning a unit on color, I first introduced a fun project with lots of colors. I showed the students some photographs of jellyfish (which really aren't very colorful; if you've ever seen them in real life, they often are fairly transparent, and just a milky white). Then, I told the students that sometimes artists use color to enhance their art, adding colors where they don't really belong to make the picture beautiful. Then, the students began drawing jellyfish from the photographs I had, but altering the colors. They used oil pastels on fade-resistant black construction paper. But, black is hard to photograph, so the photos don't do the actual artwork justice!