Winter Mini Watercolors

Jen Arnayi was the perfect choice for a one day project the week before holiday break.  Her illustrative style offered simplicity and yet a very colorful mini painting.  Fourth grade students painted on a round format using 4 x 4 scraps of watercolor paper that were left over from a previous project making this a win-win.  I saved some small pieces of paper avoiding waste.  The lesson began as a directed draw with instruction to draw a line of pointed mountains across the center area of the circle.  A horizon line was drawn under the mountains curving downward to the bottom area of the circle.  Based on personal interpretations, all of the projects began to develop their own style at this point.  Later discussions included adding a 3D dimension and texture to the mountains.  Students then shared previous knowledge as to what the cool colors are as they began to paint the area above the mountains.  Everyone was excited to tape a mat on these and take them home to share with family for the holidays. 

       

1st grade Mono printing

I discovered this great post over on Mrs. Knight's Smartest Artist the other day for Northern Light mono prints and I immediately knew I wanted to try this approach to mono printing with my first grade students.   I reviewed the steps as they were given and every student experienced success.  Our approach was just for a winter scene that reflected what we could see around us after a recent snow storm.  Here are a few photos of student work.

 
  

A winter wonderland

2nd grade Student Work

Pinterest recently led me over to a post on Kitchentableclassroom.com demonstrating how to do evergreen trees with markers and water.  I was drawn to the originality and knew immediately I would switch up my next lesson on the Element, Space and incorporate the trees into the project.  We began with a directed draw for the trees and discussed size and placement to demonstrate the illusion of Space.  Students followed along on day one to draw the trees, a few lines to show hills and the horizon using sharpie markers.  Day two concentrated on diagonal lines to denote the needles of the evergreens using water based markers.  They also added a little blue along the hills and horizon to represent snow shadows.  Those that had time painted with water in the areas of the watercolor markers.  For day three, students personalized their compositions with a emphasis on overlap and size to further demonstrate understanding of space.  I was thrilled with how creative my students became as they planned their compositions. 

Student Work

Student Work

Success or Failure??

student work

I wanted to attempt something a little different with first grade students this year to introduce them to warm and cool colors.  After surfing through some blog post and perusing Pinterest, I decided I wanted to try the bleeding tissue paper to create a background for a winter tree composition.  This would be similar to a project I have previously done with first grade but with a new twist.  I pre-cut squares and rectangles of the tissue paper in the warm colors and had students to cover their papers with any pattern they chose.  Meanwhile, another piece of paper was painted only used cool colors with watercolor paint.  Week two I supplied students with triangle tracers in a variety of sizes to use on the cool color paper.  They needed three trees in three different sizes.  When I peeled away the tissue paper from the warm color work, I was disappointed with the coverage or I should say lack of coverage.  I couldn't imagine how the project was going to turn out to be anything near to what I had envisioned in my planning.  Here are a few of the results.

student work

student work

I decided to shift my focus to perspective and introduced students to creating space in their composition.  They could overlap or use size to demonstrate the illusion of space. They began by drawing curved lines on the tissue painted paper to create three different lines in space.  We talked about the outline of mountains and imagined what that might look like.  Then students glued their trees, one on each of the different levels.  They were reminded to place the smallest tree in the background and the largest in the foreground.  They finished up by adding black crayon lines to create the trunks and the limbs of the trees.  This is definitely not what I anticipated this project would turn out to look like but I am really drawn to the abstract qualities of the work.  The goals and vision changed but I do feel like the project is a success.