Pinterest led me to this great blog by an Italian art teacher.  I like a lot of her ideas and used a few of them with my sixth graders this year.  One of the units that drew my eye was this Chinese vase drawing project.  My students learned about Ming pottery and blue Chinese vase painting in general (because not all of it was from the Ming Dynasty).  They researched imagery online and designed a variety of vases with different designs on them based on their research.  We drew the vases with pencil, used our shading skills to color them in with blue oil pastels and then completely painted over them with white acrylic paint (gasp!).  After the paint dried, we used toothpicks to incise into the paint so that the blue oil pastel would show through.  After carefully incising each vase, students cut out their pieces, glued them to background paper and added cast shadows with pencil.