John Schoenherr

Today's project for Storybook Art was Owl Moonby Jane Yolen. The illustrations are by John Schoenherr. MaryAnn Kohl'ssuggested activity for this book was a beautiful watercolor painting of a winter scene with contact paper shapes placed over the white paper before painting to create a resist. In this way it is easy for students to save part of the page to be white for snow. After the watercolor painting has dried, you peel off the contact paper and see the results! This art project is BEAUTIFUL in implementation and I highly recommend it. I thought it might be too complicated for my students to try to imagine where they'd want the white space to be, but it worked. I think all the care we took in planning the scene was really helpful.




Here are the steps:

Paint your watercolor paper all over with clear water and let it dry.

With a pencil, lightly sketch a winter scene. With a black or grey crayon, go over a few of the lines to make them stand out.

Cut pieces of contact paper into shapes (moon, footprints, snowbanks, etc.) to cover the areas of your artwork that you would like to stay white. Remove the paper backing and place the contact paper as desired.

Mix two kinds of blue and two kinds of grey watercolor paint so that you have four colors to choose from. With a wide soft brush, paint the night sky and shadows onto your winter scene. The crayon and the contact paper will both resist the paint. Try mixing the blues and greys together to see what new colors you can make.

Let the paint dry, then peel off the contact paper. Ta da!


As a teacher, I noted that helping students peel the backing off their contact paper shapes was the most difficult and time-consuming part of the process. We did this project in one day but it works best to break it into parts. We began at 11 am with my reading of the story, started the art project and went all the way up until placing the contact paper shapes, ending at 11:30 am. We then came back at 2 pm and did the painting and set the paintings to dry (I just had the students leave them on their art trays and we set the trays along the bookcases to dry and did another lesson). At 3 pm we took off the contact paper to reveal the finished product and the children took their artwork home. They really loved working with the contact paper so I think it was worth all the tricky bits of helping students take off the backing. Enjoy!