Sea Turtle Art Project

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Sea turtles are among our favorite animals around here.

We’ve read about sea turtles, watched sea turtle videos, and even searched for sea turtle nests on vacation. One of our favorite sea turtle projects was creating sea turtle art!

Create Sea Turtle Art

Turtle shells are amazing. They come in so many intricate designs and patterns – the perfect theme for an art project! This sea turtle art project combines 2 different types of media, drawing and the new zentangle art form.

To begin, draw your turtle outline on paper. Use thicker paper than we did here, for reasons you’ll understand momentarily. Cardstock or watercolor paper would be good. Next, draw a grid on the turtle shell, unless you are making a leatherback turtle as my son did. In that case, draw long stripes.

Using a zentangle technique, make colorful patterns with crayons in each grid square or strip. Use any color except maybe blue and fill in all the white space.

When you are finished coloring your sea turtle, it’s time to add the water. Using watercolor paints, paint the entire paper with the blue color. It’s a sea turtle, so it needs to be under the water. This is where using a thicker paper would be good. The thicker paper wouldn’t ripple like ours did. However, the ripples pretty much disappeared when it dried.

Did you notice what happened? The wax in the crayons resisted the watercolor, so the color of the crayon drawing didn’t change. Where there was blank paper with no crayon, the watercolor adhered to the paper. This is called watercolor resist art. The kids love combining art media. It creates a beautiful effect.

Reptile and Turtle Studies

This sea turtle art would be a great edition to a reptile or turtle unit study. Need study ideas?

Sea Turtle Unit Study Links

10 Reptile Study Ideas and FREE Printables

Turtle Unit Study Ideas

I hold a master’s degree in child development and early education and am working on a post-baccalaureate in biology. I spent 15 years working for a biotechnology company developing IT systems in DNA testing laboratories across the US. I taught K4 in a private school, homeschooled my children, and have taught on the mission field in southern Asia. For 4 years, I served on our state’s FIRST Lego League tournament Board and served as the Judging Director. I own thehomeschoolscientist and also write a regular science column for Homeschooling Today Magazine. You’ll also find my writings on the CTCMath blog. Through this site, I have authored over 50 math and science resources.