Fish Paper Sculpture

I've been doing an underwater unit with most of my classes since returning from winter break. I've been doing so much 3d art with my fifth graders, I though we'd combine 3d and 2d for their first underwater project. I checked out tons of books on fish and sea creatures from our library. I also showed a short video of some amazing underwater footage of all sorts of different sea creatures. I told them to be very observant of the art elements that they are seeing in the fish. Each student was required to draw two fish on their choice of colored construction paper. They needed to draw lots of details, but keep the coloring to a minimum since we were using colored construction paper. Once their fish were drawn and colored, they created the paper waves from two shades of blue and attached the fish with some glue and staple here and there to secure it for good measure.

(*The idea for this started on a photograph I saw on Mr. E's art blog*)