Sep 22, 2011

Wet-on-Wet Watercolor Trees

My goal for my watercolor students is to have them learn how to bleed colors together when they want, and keep them separate when they do not. This series of modern trees were easy to draw, and left lots of room for watercolor experimenting.
1. I was inspired by Eloise Renouf’s Etsy store, and used her designs to help students draw very simple abstract trees. I drew six or so examples on my board and had the students draw their three favorite in pencil across a sheet of watercolor paper.
2. I emphasized that all the pencil lines had to be traced very heavily with crayon so they would show up when complete.
3. Students were to use two colors of paint in each tree, each color overlapping the other just a bit. If this is done while the paints are still wet, a very pretty bleeding will occur. I also asked them to use two shades of color in the grass, as I had provided both green and yellow green for them to work with. The sky was to be just one color to keep the multicolors from becoming too much. I love how they turned out. This was made by Alena, a talented 2nd grader. Thanks Alena!

4 comments:

Meghan said...

Thats super cool!

jaeartworks said...

that is beautiful.

brenna said...

What a lovely piece. My kids have been into the watercolors lately, so this would be a perfect project to try!

April Brown said...

I did this project today and it turned our fabulously. My kids loved the experimentation of working with watercolors.
Thank you for the idea.
I will post pictures tonight. You're instructions were nice and clear and I liked how the students got a chance to blend colors and experiment with watercolors at the same time they created a piece of art.
Ms. Brown's Grade 2 Class