Rainy Day Watercolours

This is a great watercolour and crayon resist lesson idea I got from Natalie from smART Class. You can find all the instructions on her blog. I had actually never used artist quality watercolours and watercolour paper with students before as I have always figured it would be too expensive, however this was a simple introduction to watercolour techniques in which we only used one small piece of paper per student and only three different colours - and it only took one lesson on a rainy day to complete!

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. 

Rousseau Rainforests

Inspiration: The jungle paintings of French painter Henri Rousseau (1844-1910).

 This lesson was intended to teach students how to create a landscape drawing which implies depth using foreground, mid-ground and background. Much like Rousseau himself, students used plant life around the school grounds and pictures of rainforests and animals to inspire their drawings. They were asked to have an animal as their focal point and to use a variety of line types to show different plant life. They then used watercolour pencils to add colour and outlined in a black marker once painting was complete. I was impressed with how hard they all worked on these, particularly the grade threes.

Vintage Car Drawings

Inspiration: My junior primary students are all learning about "the olden days" in class so I thought we would do some drawings based on beautiful vintage cars from the roaring 1920s.

These drawings were mostly done by grade 2s most of whom were keen to try drawing their car as a 3D form after my demonstration. After discussing the colours and tones in old sepia and black and white photographs, students then outlined in black marker and coloured with watercolour pencils and ink in shades of brown and black.