Beverly Buchanan is a contemporary artist that I chose to highlight because I thought her work was great for the kids to imitate.

She paints a lot of shacks and that's a great subject matter for the children.

I actually made this activity into a texture and color lesson as well.

We had started one week by making textured, painted papers using complementary colors. Complementary and contemporary were 2 new words that I introduced to my third graders. 

I gave them specific colored papers to paint and to texture using complementary colored paints and papers. For example: If I gave them red papers then they received green paint. Green/red, orange/blue, purple/yellow are the basic complementary or contrasting colors. They are opposite each other on the color wheel.​They got a piece of tru-ray construction paper, the complementary color, a paint brush and texture tools. I used combs real and homemade and texture rollers. 

They had to paint their papers and then run texture tools through them to create different textures.

Personally I wasn't so thrilled with how this part of the activity turned out​. I'm not sure why the colors didn't come through the construction paper as well as I thought As a result, before they cut up the papers I allowed them to create even more texture on the backs of their painted papers. They were able to use any items that had texture on them along with texture plates. They used oil pastels to rub the paper against the textured objects..

After the papers were finished being textures the kids cut them up into many different shapes.

The next week I introduced them to Beverly Buchanan and showed a couple of her works. They then had to create shack or shacks pictures using the cut up pieces of construction paper.​

They know from past activities about​ horizons lines and not leaving any white in their pictures so all of the pictures came out very colorful.

Below is a display of all of them (note the one that has Hurricane Sandy written on it. (a third grader with a sense of humor.