Underground Carrot Painting

After reading the book, The Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss, my youngest and I were inspired to create out own carrot artwork.

I was inspired by this botanical water color lesson on Classic Play and adapted it for my 4-year-old to try.

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We began by talking about how carrots grow. What part of the carrot is below ground and what part of the carrot is above ground?

I worked right along beside my daughter and we drew a line across the middle of our paper for the ground. There is no need to be straight, after all the ground is never a straight line.

Under the line we drew the shape of the carrot and above the line we drew the wispy leaves. We used the illustrations in the book for guidance.

After we were satisfied with our drawings, we traced and colored our carrot with oil pastels. We love to use these oil pastels from Discount School Supply.

You can do this step with crayon, but you will want to use a heavy hand while coloring. I love the oil pastels because they are so dark and waxy without having to press down too hard.

After coloring, we used liquid water colors (also from Discount School Supply) to paint the ground and the sky.

Since we used oil pastels for the carrots, we could have painted over the drawing to make a nice water color resist painting.

Miss Preschool did not want to, so she just painted up to the edge of her carrot. I think her painting turned out fabulous!

We had a lot of fun exploring The Carrot Seed and this was just one of the projects we did. Stay tuned tomorrow to find out the rest of our carrot projects!