Save your old food magazines for this bug collage project. The shiny and colorful fruit, for example, has a whole new look when viewed as bug parts.

Collage is one of those areas of art that can be easy to overlook, but it really has so much to offer. Aside from making a great connection to famous collage artists of the past, such as Romare Bearden, it can also give students who aren’t as confident with drawing and painting a completely different creative outlet.

With collage, the creativity comes from choosing, combining, arranging, and transforming images. Students can focus less on how accurately they can draw something and more on the interesting decisions they make along the way.

I’ve found, though, that collage projects often work best when they aren’t completely open-ended. Giving students a narrower challenge can help get those creative ideas flowing. In this project, for instance, students search for interesting textures to use in a bug collage. Asking them to look specifically at food images makes the challenge a little unexpected—and often leads to some wonderfully unusual combinations.

Older students can create their own bug shapes, using folded paper to explore symmetry as they work. Younger students can use the bug template included in the download below. The shapes are labeled too, so students can learn about the head, thorax, abdomen, and wings while they create.

A project that combines collage, creativity, symmetry, and a little science along the way? I’d call that a win-win.