First Friday Art Class for March 2012 - Color Craziness

This month our focus was COLOR, COLOR and more COLOR. We worked with watercolors in 3 different ways.

We began by making splatter creatures. You get a nice blog of juicy watercolor paints on your paper and then blow it around with a straw, like this:

You then let the splatters dry and then go back in with a thin permanent marker and add eyes to make splatter creatures. You can also add branches, words, anything!!

Once again the girls completely blew me away with their ideas and creativity. They each tried doing particular shapes and everyone's splatters were different (and wonderful!!).

We then moved onto rubber cement paintings. I splattered rubber cement on the paper hours before class. I would have liked the girls to be able to do it, but it wouldn't have been dry in time. Here they are drying in preparation for class:

The rubber cement acts as a mask for the watercolor. (There are more technical masking agents you can use with watercolor, but rubber cement is easy and cheap, so that's what we used).

The girls took their respective pages with the rubber cement dry and ready to go and they added color. However they wanted to. We talked about blending the colors into each other and letting them flow and stay a bit wet.

Here are their finished paintings--don't you love the gorgeous, bright, happy colors?? They will peel the rubber cement off once the painting is completely dry.

Here's one that's completely finished:

The last thing we worked on was painting a strawberry using first pencil, then thin permanent marker and then watercolor. They worked from life--having an actual strawberry to look at while they drew.

And here are their finished pieces:

Aren't they beautiful?

We had a lovely, color filled, (almost) Spring day! Looking forward to next month!!