Watercolor kingdom

What a better way to examine animals and their coloring than through a watercolor project.  And even better than that we were studying impressionism and how they looked at color and watercolor is the perfect medium for that too.

We started by looking at impressionist artists and comparing their different styles. There are a couple of great Youtube videos that have slideshows set to music montages and they show basically all of the works that that artist has created.  I am attaching the video link for the Claude Monet video.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8mct7uJyRs  The rest of the videos are under the name of ArtsHeaven.com if you are interested in checking them out.    After we watched the videos (we did it over the course of several days) we then compared the styles and then had a quiz where I put random artwork on the board and they had to figure out which artist had created it.

After studying the impressionists when then dive into watercolor painting.  We start by doing a couple of small samples at the same time.  The reason being that watercolor needs some time to dry and we can work on two things at once so we don't have to sit and watch it dry,

The first one is using the colors of the color wheel in shades of dark, medium and light to create a color pallet that they can use as reference when they do their final watercolor painting.  This hopefully shows them what colors will mix well and what they will look like when they mix.

This is our other small sample, the city scene.  We start by painting the background with a wet on wet technique.  This picture will be done in monochromatic and so they need to think of that when they pick a paint color.  We then slowly build the city and get it darker as we work our way down to the bottom of the paper.  They also have to add details as we work down, like windows, streets or towers on buildings.

Our next group practice project is this water color boat.  I have tried in the past some other examples, but I always come back to my boat because it uses the most techniques.  We do wet on wet, wet on dry, watercolor pencil and crayon, salt, and resist.

Finally I give them an opportunity to pick an animal, insect, fish or bird and have them draw it on a 9 x 12 piece of watercolor paper.  After they draw the animal and their surroundings I have them draw a box 2" in from the outside.  This gives a box in the middle of the paper where they will paint a watercolor background, but if the animal goes outside of the box it trumps the box line.   So in other words they have to paint all of their animal and then whatever is left on the inside of the box.  On the outside of the box I have them use ultra fine marker to outline the surroundings.  This gives them a mixed media, a border and a chance to really evaluate their project from a different perspective.

This is the second year I have done this project this way.  I don't know if I am sold on it and I am thinking next year I would like to try to teach them how to fade out the edges of the project for a more dramatic treatment.

Jaikob D. 

Drea B.

Paige S.

Nikole K. - sorry I couldn't get it to rotate back.