Year 3 Line and Shape Art Lessons: Nested Hearts
Hearts inside hearts, scattered hearts and bold hearts bursting with colour! These Year 3 Line and Shape Art Lessons turn a familiar shape into an exploration of repetition, pattern and personal expression.
How many ways can you reinvent a heart? Through nesting, scattering and repeating, students discover that one recognisable shape can produce wonderfully different artworks. Changing its size, colour, placement or outline gives them plenty of choices without needing a complicated subject to draw.
These Year 3 Line and Shape Art Lessons give those choices a clear structure. Inspired by Jim Dine and Keith Haring, students explore how artists return to familiar shapes and make them their own, then carry that thinking into clay, painting and digital art-making.
Hearts Within Hearts
The Nested Hearts theme encourages students to look beyond a single outline. Hearts can sit inside one another, scatter across a background or repeat in a grid. Repeated shapes bring a picture together, while changes in colour, size and spacing give each artwork its own character. A familiar starting point leaves room for students to experiment and develop their ideas.
Digital mirroring brings another dimension to that exploration. Students experiment with flowing colour and mirrored heart shapes before combining their skills in a finished digital artwork. The heart motif connects the clay, painting and digital Studio Work, giving students opportunities to revisit their learning through different materials.
Meet the Artists Behind the Hearts
Jim Dine shows students how much possibility can live inside one shape. His repeated use of hearts invites exploration of colour, texture and variation, with Four Hearts providing a clear starting point for noticing how similar forms can each look different. Students can see that repeating a shape does not mean making every version identical.
Keith Haring offers a lively contrast through Untitled (Two Figures with Red Heart). His bold outlines and sense of movement give students another way to think about the same motif. Looking at Dine’s painterly hearts alongside Haring’s graphic approach helps young artists recognise how colour and line can change the feeling of a picture.
Where This Sits in the CampFire Pathway
This Year 3 unit is one of eleven year-level units in CampFire, the Drawing Toolkit’s connected Line and Shape pathway from Foundation to Year 10. Nested Hearts develops students’ use of repetition, arrangement and variation, encouraging more deliberate choices as they build compositions.
Each unit has its own artists, focus and Studio Work while sharing a reliable structure of ten weekly Core Skills mini-lessons, hands-on and digital art-making, quizzes and reflection. Teach Year 3 as a standalone ten-week journey or alongside other year levels in the full CampFire Line and Shape pathway.
Who Are These Year 3 Line and Shape Art Lessons For?
This unit suits Year 3 classroom teachers wanting a ready-to-teach art term without needing a specialist art background, as well as Visual Arts specialists building a connected sequence across year levels. Familiar shapes provide an accessible starting point, while opportunities to vary colour, line and composition give students room to develop their own responses.
Ready-to-teach lesson slides, a Teacher Guide, a Quiz Book with answers and a Posters Pack are included, together with Australian Curriculum v9 planning support. Printable heart templates in three sizes are also included, ready for a sketchbook activity, painting warm-up and the clay project. Shared weekly skills keep the class learning together, while Studio Work allows students to progress at different paces.
One familiar shape, plenty of possibilities, and room for every young artist to put their heart into it.
Explore other year levels in the full CampFire: Line and Shape collection.
