Eliasson-inspired art project on our blog to celebrate Earth day
Olafur Eliasson is a Danish artist known for his sculptures and large-scale installations where he uses materials such as light, water and air temperature to enhance the viewer’s experience. Eliasson believes art can inspire people to take action. His artworks explore important concerns of our time – for example, climate change, sustainability, energy and migration. He often uses reflections, colour and shadows to play with the way we understand and interact with the world.
Materials: Chalk pastels, pencil, large white paper
In the morning or late afternoon, place a table in a sunny spot where long shadows will be cast.
Place a large sheet of paper on the table and arrange a variety of objects along the paper’s edge – for example a toy giraffe, or even fruit! It may also help to place the objects on wooden blocks to get some height. Use no more than three objects.
Carefully trace the shadows in pencil and use your chalk pastels to colour them in.
Now go back to your objects, place them back on the paper, but this time move them slightly to one side so that you get two overlapping shadows of each object. Trace around these.
Colour these second shadows in new colours, mixing and merging the chalk with your fingers. Repeat this process as many times as you want, to create as many overlapping colourful rainbow merging shadows as you like!
CHEAT TIP – If tracing the shadows becomes difficult, children can also place the objects directly onto the paper and trace around them!
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