Art Curriculum- Week 30- Watercolor Blue Jay- Step by Step

Week 30- Watercolor Blue Jay- Step by Step

Category: Summer

What you will need:

-big/medium/little brushes (these don't have to be specific sizes, but it was good to expose the kids to having to use different brushes to accomplish different things)
-salt
-paint palettes
-cups/bowls to hold water
-multipurpose paper

-green, red, yellow, brown, light blue (ours was called turquoise), dark blue, purple, black, paint

-hairdryer (optional to speed up the salt drying process)

Time: 1.5 hours approx. (this is a more advanced project, the kids started to get impatient towards the end so maybe plan for a break halfway through - snacks are always a safe path to go!)

Prep (was an hour because I decided to draw the bird instead of going with a coloring sheet - the reference photo is from Pinterest).

 

Project:

• 1: Background first! BIG brush. Green paint to cover the background. Drop the colors on quickly as you can without touching the bird. Sprinkle with salt. Dry with hairdryer.
• 2: Red berries/flowers. BIG brush. Use the side of the brush to mark the paper. Be sure to leave white spots as much as possible.
• 2: Green. Paint the leaves, fill in the white parts with the red.

• 4: Yellow: BIG brush. Fill in the tree. Solid yellow. (tip: always try to paint the lightest colors first!)
• 5: Brown. MEDIUM brush. Shade the bottom of the tree trunk.
• Light blue. MEDIUM brush. Use side of the brush the make the blots. Paint the tail solid light blue.

• 7: Purple. MEDIUM brush. Paint top half of the birds back and try to blend with the bottom part of the bird. Paint purple on the top of the birds head.
• 7: (continued) SMALL brush. Dark blue. Add dark blue to the light blue blotches and the top of the head. The beak is dark blue and so is the eye.
• 7: (continued) SMALL brush. Black. Detail. Black around the eye and feathering around the face. Emphasize the importance of leaving the chest and belly white along with parts of the face.

Overall: A lengthy project filled with a lot of detail. It's worth the patience because the results are lovely! But it does take more time. Suggestions include either simplifying the picture (remove extra leaves/flowers) or inserting a break time for a snack. It depends on your kid's patience and what level they are at.

(logging 2.5 hours for prep and execution)

Trees of Orange... Gold... and Blue? - Easy Watercolor Project

One of the girls' trees!

Trees of Orange... Gold... and Blue? - Easy Watercolor Project

A bonus project for the art curriculum this week!

This is a simple project to prep for, I gathered and planned most of it this morning right before putting it into action.

The final result is so charming it's suitable for all ages: colorful and fun for younglings; sophisticated and lovely for any modern decor.

What you need:

-watercolors (it doesn't need to be expensive, we have large bottles of brilliantly colored kids watercolors)
-multipurpose paper
-brushes (cheap, but not plastic, plastic doesn't hold water)
-spray bottle
-paint palettes or bowls/cups to hold the paint

We did two pieces. The first one was just to get the technique down and play with colors.

We all used the same 3 colors: blue, red, orange. You can use whatever (and however many) colors you desire.

Time: 45 minutes for Both pieces

• Thoroughly soak your brush in the first color
• Hover the brush over the paper and use your finger on your other hand to tap and splatter the paint - don't be shy when splattering! Cover the page with blobs and splatters of all different sizes!
• Rinse your brush and move on to the next color and repeat with all the different colors.

• Now the super fun part! Take the spray bottle and spritz those colors! Take it slow at first, it'll depend on the amount of paint on your paper and how thickly you spray the water as to how the colors will run and retain their vibrancy. When it comes to adding water to watercolors, less is more.
  
• For fun, we added salt to our first masterpieces. The more salt you add, the less bold your colors will be. However it creates some fantastic texture.

Left half "After Spritzing"
Right half "After Salt"

• The second piece we made trees. I drew light, rough ovals on the paper as a guide for the kids. We used the same colors: blue, red, orange. And we were only allowed to splatter within the oval as best we could.
• Spritz with water!
• We manage to direct the dribbles by tilting and bending the paper so we ended up with tree trunks!
  

Overall: Fun. Easy. Prepare for speckled faces and arms from the splattering. I suggest a good layer of newspaper on the table to help with easy cleanup and spills. :)

Related art projects:

-Perspective With Watercolors
-Watercolor Winter Scene
-Expressions in Color

(logging 1 1/2 hours for prep and execution)

Art Curriculum- Week 2- 1 Point Perspective

Reference Picture

Week 2- 1 Point Perspective

Last week's lesson involved basic gridding. If you want to view it you can click here.

This week's lesson was 1 Point Perspective.

Artistic Movement: Renaissance

The project was good practice for watercolor painting with different methods and listening to instructions.

What you'll need:
-watercolors
-plain art paper of some kind (it doesn't have to be fancy but for water colors you want paper other than regular copy paper so that the watercolors have some texture to soak into)

Time: 40 minutes approx.

The original painting (pictured above) is something I found on Pinterest. I used it as a reference and quickly drew 7 rough copies of it using a sharpie.

I kept it basic, explained how when things are far away they get smaller and smaller whereas when things are closer they get bigger. I used a paint bottle on hand and I zoomed in back and forth in front of them.

This was another piece that I did step by step with the kids. I gave them one color at a time and we moved in stripes down the page. Blue-Orange-Yellow-Purple-etc.

For the red and orange ground I had them "messily" color within the lines with red leaving wide spaces. Then I gave them the orange and had them fill in all the white spots. I wanted there to be a bit of color mixing going on without creating mud.

The road we used black paint but I had them practice using lots of water with their brushes while taking tiny dabs of paint to achieve a lighter gray.

Overall: Easy and fun project. Simple cleanup (watercolors don't stain) and the kids love painting so it was a great learning experience.

In Addition: Something you might want to point out and explain is that cooler colors (blue, deep purple, etc) make things look farther away, while warmer colors (red, yellow, etc) make things appear closer. ;)

Related Posts:

Art Curriculum- Week 1- Gridding
Creating an Art Curriculum

(logging in 1 hour for prep and execution)

Sketchbook #1

I've been working in my sketchbook all of December.

Alas I haven't been posting as much as I would've liked; life has been charging along with its usual energy. :)

I hope everyone has been enjoying their holiday season. Where I am we've had a decent fall of snow (at last!) though the forecast is threatening to send it away.

Here are some excerpts from my sketchbook. :)

Sherlock. I went over it with
watercolor.

I used a sketch I found on a Pinterest as a reference photo

I decided to draw a calendar and then fill it in with dates in
no particular order.

I punched holes in several pages to add texture. :)
The top page contains quotes from
"Atlas" from Catching Fire

Quick sketch of the dragon on my cover of the Hobbit book.
The swirls in the border all have different
locations of middle-earth written around them.

Tardis from Doctor Who.
Colored with prismacolor pencils.

I couldn't resist uploading a picture of the
snow Tardis my niece and I made! :D

Sketch- watercolor experiments

Happy Tuesday!!!

I bring you my experiments from the weekend. A mixture of watercolor, pen and water, and some pixlr effects.

First up is ink with blue watercolor to highlight the front raven. I brushed over the birds with water and it created the cool shadows.

The woman's face I did the pen and water effect. I splurged on red, brown and black warercolors and used up the last of the blue to accent.

Black and white now because it looks cool. :)

Agh this one I can't decide if I like it or not. He looks creepy. I mean I wanted him to look a little sad and hard pressed, he just looks like the undead. O_o I like it, but I've got mixed feelings about it.

Based on one of my favorite characters in a recent book I read. I suppose it reflects my unhappiness towards what the author is doing to him.

Edited. Wooooo... :)

Hello

This piece contains lyrics from the band Evanescence's song "Hello."

It is a combination of watercolor and very thin copic markers.

Playground school bell rings again

Rain clouds come to play again

Has no one told you she's not breathing?

Hello, I'm your mind giving you someone to talk to

Hello

If I smile and don't believe

Soon I know I'll wake from this dream

Don't try to fix me, I'm not broken

Hello, I'm the lie living for you so you can hide

Don't cry

Suddenly I know I'm not sleeping

Hello, I'm still here

All that's left of yesterday

It's a beautiful song, with a slow and haunting melody. Part of what makes it so powerful is how subtle everything is, it's quiet and restrained. You have to turn up the volume a little and pause to think about what the lead singer is saying.

"Hello, I'm your mind giving you someone to talk to,"

I listened to it repeatedly and each time I heard new things.

This is a somewhat unusual piece for me, but I loved experimenting with the washed out streaks and diluting the black paint to achieve a bleak effect. The copic markers were also an experiment concerning detail that I can't achieve with a paintbrush unless I were to spend hours pouring over the paper.

~Bright