Japanese Koi Fish Drawings

My students started learning Japanese language at school last year, so I thought I would do some Japanese themed art work from time to time in the Art Room.

Thanks to Alison from Polka Dot Spot for this beautiful lesson idea. I love it and it was a perfect introduction to Japanese art. 

This was a special lesson for me as it also resulted in one of my favourite pieces of student art work all year. The drawing above is so amazing and created by one of my fantastic grade two students. Yes, he is 7 years old and his drawing shows his amazing knowledge of form, movement and tone. I was so proud!

I went through some basic steps for drawing a Koi and then students used photographs of swimming Koi as a reference to draw either one large or two small swimming fish. Their drawings were outlined in black marker and then coloured using watercolour pencils. 

We used lines of smudged charcoal to create the ripple effect and also cut our drawings into a pond shape before mounting onto black card.