The Shamrock

For St Patrick's Day (it's a Catholic school ) we focus on the life of St. Patrick and his use of the shamrock to describe the Trinity.

This year I found myself repeating the phrase "God is found in the smallest of spaces..." so I used this as the inspiration for this project.

Originally I was going to do this shamrock, a painting with a little pastel resist for the white on the leaves, with the rainbow background.......but I think I prefer the hands and it makes a good technical exercise for the kids  (hands always need practice).

As usual I look to my notes.....I have several sketchbooks, notepads, where I'm constantly jotting down ideas, sometimes way in advance.  I always have way more ideas than I have time for.  I also find myself going back to ideas I had 2 or 3 years ago and giving them a try.

So for this lesson have your students study there hands.  They can even trace out the shape for one and have a fellow student help them trace out the other.

Have them look at the creases, lines and shadows.....how these change when you cup your hands....where the light hits the bottom of the hand near the wrist.  Now add some color with paint, pastel, colored pencil to show this variation.

For younger kids you might just want to cut them out of brown paper and add a little shading.

Paint a background if you want.

You can glue your hands on to this background......looking at this picture I could see you only doing one hand if you wanted.

Paint a shamrock, or color, or cut out of colored paper.....I left some white around the edges so I had a space to write " The Father, The Son, The Holy Spirit".

I then used book pages, newspaper headlines, stamps and paint to put in my verse.