Art Lessons: Watercolor Resist Circles

When we worked on our The Little House pictures, Lizzie told me that she wanted to learn to make pretty pictures.

I took this as a personal challenge to come up with some “art lessons” for her to give her some of the tools needed to produce beautiful artwork.

I’m not a trained art teacher. In fact, I haven’t had an art class since high school. So, I’m just coming up with some ideas in the hopes that it helps her learn that art can come in many forms and also give her some opportunities to produce something pretty.

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For our first lesson, I thought we would tackle watercolor resist with crayons.

We talked a little bit about primary and secondary colors as we chose the two colors we would use for this project – once primary one secondary.

She chose red for her primary and purple for her secondary color. In addition, I set out several things we could use as stencils to create circles.

I used water color paper again for this project because Lizzie can be a bit heavy handed when it comes to watercolors. So, the thicker paper, the better!

We started out by tracing circles all over our paper. It helps to be heavy handed with the crayons.

Once the circles were done, we painted over the entire paper with red paint.

Lizzie wasn’t quite satisfied with her picture as it was and thought it needed something a bit extra – hand prints. Hmmmm… it looks a bit (no, a lot) like a prop for a horror movie, but she was pleased.

And, of course, I’m not going to tell her it’s not suitable, because one important lesson I’m trying to teach her is that there is no right or wrong with art. Art is what you make of it.

I was creating right along side Lizzie and used orange for my crayon choice and here are our finished products. They didn’t quite turn out how I expected, but they turned out well nonetheless.

Lizzie was done, but I still wasn’t satisfied.

So, after bedtime, I tackled the project again. After all, I felt like if I was going to share this with you, I should at least figure out what would work better.

This time I reversed the color order. I made the circles with the primary color, red, and used orange as my water color choice.

I thinned the paint out more and tried again. Voila, the look I was going for! If you’re going to give this project a try, use thick crayon lines and thin watercolor.

Here they all are side by side. They all turned out wonderful, although I’m still not sure about those hand prints!

Here’s my question for you: Do you have any suggestion for art lessons for Lizzie? What other techniques should I show her?