Rousseau-ish Mixed Media Jungles

We looked at Rousseau's 'Surprised! (Tropical Storm with a Tiger)'. We especially enjoyed the way the artist makes us feel as though we are inside the picture, with the wild jungle all around us, and decided that one of the ways he has achieved this is by making the plants large and overlapping so that we catch only glimpses of the sky through the foliage, and they extend out beyond the frame of the picture like a photograph.

The kids were also interested to find out that Rousseau didn't actually travel to the exotic places he painted, instead adapting and enlarging his favourite plants and flowers to make them appear like a luxuriant tropical scene.

We used torn paper mounted on a black mount and watercolor resist  to create our jungle backgrounds, pulling our plants up to the top of the page and beyond so that they tower over our heads and draw us into the picture. We filled our jungles with overlapping grasses and plants, vines and exotic flowers and animals.

While our backgrounds dried, we drew jungle animals onto brown paper with black markers, and we filled the spaces around our animals with leaf shapes before adding more colour with wax crayons.

Finally, we collaged the animals and leaves onto our backgrounds, overlapping into the torn border to bring them forward in the page and add depth to our compositions.

Our finished pictures are fabulous - very Rousseau-ish indeed!