Micha Archer is an award winning illustrator of children’s books. She might be most known for her Caldecott Honor winner WONDER WALKERS, but she has illustrated a whole stack of gorgeous books. As a lover of children’s books, especially picture books, I love reading aloud to children but I also love encouraging them to think about how books are created.
Picture books, especially incredibly lovely ones, are excellent models for children in how to write and how to create art. The magic of picture books is how those two elements interact and build off of one another.
This art project is an invitation to create a collage. We focused on three books by Micha Archer and then worked on making collage art.
Brilliant Read Aloud Picture Books
Wonder Walkers is the stunning Caldecott Honor book both written and illustrated by Micha Archer.
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Prairie Days was written by Patricia MacLachlan. It’s a summer story that is full of stunning landscape collages.
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Snow Horses is a new year story. It is also written by Patricia MacLachlan and the textured collage art once again absolutely steals the show. It’s amazing.
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Look Closely
We read the books and then went back and looked more closely. We discussed our favorite spreads, details we noticed, made guesses about the materials used. Some questions to get you started:
- What do you notice about the art?
- What similarities do you notice between the art in the different books?
- Tell me about your favorite spread? What do you like about it?
- How do you think the illustrator created these trees?
Learn More about Micha Archer
Micha Archer has a great website: https://www.michaarcher.com/. One of our favorite parts is this video she includes that offers a peek at her process.
Create a Collage
Once you’ve had a good look together at the artwork in Micha Archers books, invite the kids to make their own collage art.
Materials:
- Collection of photos of landscapes or nature scenes. These can be photos, magazine pages, printed from the computer. They will just be inspiration for the kids.
- Variety of art materials – paper of different kinds, colors and textures including recycled artwork.
- Other textured items such as doilies, fabrics, etc.
- Tools: scissors, glue, hole punches.
- Thick cardstock paper – one per child.
Process:
Tell the kids that they’re going to create a collage like Archer. Invite them to choose one of the photos as a starting place. Their art doesn’t need to be a collage replica, it’s art after all, but having a starting place is helpful.
Invite them to think about different ways they could represent what they see in the picture with the materials available. Encourage them to play, try things, move them around on the paper and have a dialogue about their ideas.
When they’re happy with their ideas – invite them to start gluing materials.
