She loves watercolors and wanted to do something with animals that live in the snow. In past workshops and camps, she has gravitated towards penguins so I wasn't that surprised she chose to do an animal theme picture and winter animals to boot!
I pulled out reference for polar bears and penguins. I then had a couple of request for arctic foxes and snow bunnies. All easy request for me to fulfill.
I taped down large sheets of watercolor paper and gave the party guest time to work out their sketches on practice paper before transferring them onto the watercolor paper.
We discussed finding the shapes of the animals to begin a sketch and also how they could make artist choices to simplify their compositions from what they saw on the reference and even a bit about abstracting their animals and what that actually meant.
They then traced over their drawings with sharpie pen.
I gave a quick demonstration on some of the techniques they could utilize with the watercolors, wet on wet, scratching, salt, and blooming.
I then handed out a palette of primary colors and black.
Before they started I shared with them how they didn't have to paint their animals realistic colors, they could paint "crazy" colors that evoked feelings, temperature or was just their favorite color.
The birthday girl was using a diving polar bear for reference and she created an amazing sketch but was unhappy with her upside down polar bear, as she wasn't quite sure she wanted the bear diving underwater. Together we discussed and brainstormed all the different reasons her polar bear could be upside down.
birthday girl
And here is what she came up with, pretty fabulous.
grade 3
grade 3
These two friends used the same snow bunny for reference but I love the how interesting the compare/contrast is between the two artworks. Although the sketches are very similar the artist choices made afterwards are unique to each child. From choosing different directions for their paper, background and how they painted their rabbits.
grade 2
This arctic fox created by the youngest party goer was fun to watch. At the start, she used her watercolor paint as regular paint and had put it on thickly on one side and declared she needed more. I challenged her to see if by adding water she could get that blue paint to cover the entire paper and she was quite surprised to see that she actually could do it. She was then lost in adding more colors to the blue, trying her hand at using the water to bloom the color and of course, had a lot of fun adding salt. Her fox was a very solid blue at the end when she told me she was finished and so I handed her a bit of paper towel and asked her to find the highlights on the reference and blot them out with the papertowel. Love her use of brushstrokes around the fox to lead the viewer into her artwork.
grade 3
The simplicity of this diving penguin is in my opinion genius. I love that the young artist was brave enough to leave out the facial features even and look at the way she used her brushstrokes in the water to created a downward motion with the penguin!
grade 3
And this happy, leaping polar bear painted in pink! How sweet. Again we brainstormed a bit about what might be in the hand of that bear and she giggled at some of the ideas. No surprise this happy bear ended up holding a present while being created at a birthday party.
grade 3
grade3
And then there were these two penguins. I am so impressed at the restraint each used when using color and although these look simple, they took just as much time for the young artist to create.
At the end when it comes time to sign their names, I always give a little talk about making a mindful decision on how to add their names to the pictures. After spending an hour and half creating the pictures, we don't want the name that was written in less than thirty seconds to be the first thing the viewer notices in the artwork. Children quickly catch onto this concept and I am always amazed at some of the creative ways they implement their names into the artwork afterwards.
Happy 8th Birthday Miss T!! Thank you for letting me share in your special day.
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