The Cursive Project: Moon

For Letter M of The Cursive Project, Trevor choose the word moon. Having taught about the solar system to 11 years' worth of 4th and 5th graders, I had a number of art projects in my mind. We ended up combining my favorites into something I never did in the classroom, primarily because of the drying time required. It's nice not to have limitations like that on projects we do at home.

Step one was to splatter yellow paint onto black cardstock.

We used a stencil brush, though an old toothbrush works really well too.

While that was drying, we worked on the moon portion of the project. We gathered our supplies: heavy watercolor paper, a circle template, white paint, flour, an empty roll of tape, and an empty pill container. We each cut a large circle from the watercolor paper and set it aside. We each put white paint into a container and then stirred in flour until the paint looked like spackle. (Trevor added a few drops of yellow paint to his; I kept mine pure white.) We used brushes to spread the thickened paint across our cut-out circles. When the circle was covered, we used the tape roll and pill container to stamp craters into the moon.

Here's how mine looked.

At this point, we set our moons aside to dry. It's very hot and dry here, and they still took a full 24 hours to dry completely. Plan on multiple days if it is cool and/or humid.

When the moon is dry, you can leave it as is... or not. I chose to use grey ink to add extra dimension and shadows to the moon. Trevor chose to cut his moon into a crescent. When you're happy with your moon, attach it to the splatter-paint background. We used a very strong double-stick tape.

Here is my finished moon:

This is Trevor's.

We're halfway done with The Cursive Project... on to Letter N!