Welcome spring with digital garden compositions made in Google Drawings.

Leslie Grace

During a recent grayscale painting project with third- to fifth-grade students, we focused on endangered species, and it turned out to be a great mix of technical work and advocacy. I was inspired by Annie Monaghan’s monochrome animal lesson. Her structure is a great way to teach value, but I decided to push it a bit further into environmental awareness. I wanted students to think about why their animal choice mattered, not just how to paint it.

We started with Andy Warhol’s 1983 Endangered Species series (see Resources). Students responded to how he treated a bald eagle or a giant panda like a celebrity, using bold and bright colors to demand attention. It was a perfect way to show them how art can bring visibility to things people usually ignore.

Students each picked an animal to research. Some chose familiar favorites, like sea turtles or wolves, while others became curious about animals they had never even heard of. They dug into why these animals are actually at risk, from things like habitat loss, pollution, and climate change, and you could see their mindset changing. They werenʼt just painting a picture of an animal anymore; they were painting a story they felt a responsibility to tell.

To get started, students used their Chromebooks to convert their reference photos to grayscale. It’s a simple trick, but it always results in an epiphany, where students stop seeing a tiger and start seeing the map of light, medium, and dark areas they need to paint. I printed the grayscale images to give students a physical reference they could keep beside them.

I allowed students to use carbon tracing paper to transfer their reference images onto the cardboard, and it was a game-changer. Some might call it a shortcut, but for my students, it lifted a tremendous weight off their shoulders. It took away that anxiety about their drawing skills that can freeze them up. Once they knew the proportions were solid, they could stop worrying about “messing up” the drawing and focus on the actual challenge, mastering the paint.

The room got surprisingly quiet once the painting started. It was great to watch students slow down and really look. They werenʼt just grabbing a tube of gray; they were mixing their own shades, squinting at their photos, and noticing those tiny shifts where a shadow deepened or a patch of fur caught the light. That kind of focus takes a lot of patience, and they really stepped up.

For the finish, we swapped the grays for bright neon backgrounds. That pop of color did exactly what we wanted: It made the animals jump off the cardboard. It was a perfect visual metaphor—the neon gets your attention, but the grayscale animal is the heart of the story.

What really hit home for me was how much students cared about what they were making. In their reflections, they werenʼt just talking about brushstrokes; they were talking with a real sense of urgency. One fifth-grader wrote, “The message of my artwork is to bring attention to how people are destroying habitats and killing animals because they think that they won’t be able to coexist.” Another admitted they’d never even heard of their animal before, but now they felt responsible for making sure other people cared, too.

Students werenʼt just painting to get a grade or to fill time; they were painting because they had something to say. It reminded me why Warhol created his series in the first place. He knew art could force people to stop and look. My students felt that power. They stopped seeing themselves as just kids in a classroom and started seeing themselves as artists with an actual voice. The project stopped being just a technical exercise and turned into advocacy for animals and the environment.

Moments like this remind me why I teach. When you give students something real to sink their teeth into and the freedom to choose their own path, they always step up. They start to realize that art isnʼt just something you do in a vacuum—it’s how you talk to the world.

Leslie Grace is an art teacher at Nebinger Elementary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. lgrace@philasd.org

When Students Realize Art Can Speak: Painting Endangered Species