Watercolor Butterfly Birthday Party

Yesterday afternoon there were ten children here to celebrate an eight year olds' birthday. The theme was butterflies and so I created a project using watercolor where each child would create a large butterfly painting.

I put out some reference for the artist to use and spent a bit of time showing them how to blend color, (they had only the primary colors and black) and several different techniques they might want to use when painting.

Instead of working out their sketches prior on working paper, I had the kids draw directly on the watercolor paper. I stressed drawing lighting so if they wanted to change a line they weren't left with a pencil mark on the paper after erasing, since any pencil mark will show through the paint.

The paper was so large that the working sketches would not of worked anyway and it was a great lesson for the kids to learn to work within mistakes since most still drew too hard and had lines showing on their paper even after copious amounts of erasing.

But without those extra marks, works like this would not of been created.

The green design is a direct result of having to incorporate the original wing she created on the left side. She decided it was too small but because she could not get the pencil mark to completely erase when redrawing the wing, she used that mark to create an interesting design that she then mirrored on the rest of the work.  She was very proud of her finished art in the end.

Using the liquid watercolors and exploring all the things they can do is always quite exciting for kids. Many get lost in the process and suddenly find themselves looking at a paper covered in so many different colors their subject matter gets lost.

Such was the case with these three artworks. The girls looked at me for help as they knew their butterflies were lost in all the color. What a great opportunity for them to develop problem solving skills and learning to think outside the box. 

The above two works were fixed by going over all the variety of colors in the butterflies with one solid color to bring it together then while they had pizza and cake, I went over their original sharpie lines with black india ink. These two things combined left the final works vibrant and quite beautiful.

This artist had every color in the rainbow on her paper, both on the background and the butterfly. She went over all the color in the background with a blue/black mixture she made and then added salt on top so some of her colors would show through.  I think all three works came out lovely in the end and are a great reminder for the artist to not give up and with a bit of ingenuity on their part, still find success no matter how daunting things might be in the beginning.

birthday girl!!

I love the way the birthday girl created the background on this work. Using blooming, salt, and a wet on wet technique that allowed the colors to mix and blend on their own, she got some very interesting results. I love how it works against the graphic nature of her drawings. Stunning!

This is a really lovely example on how adding black to the color can give beautiful muted results. I think it takes a lot of courage at eight years old to add black to bright color and she rose to the challenge marvelously. This is so pretty.

This is just all kinds of cute. How awesome are the color decisions she made?  The warm palette with just a splash of cool?  So great. 

As this artist was putting in her blue background, she chose to create a flower design using a blotting technique with the paper towel. Can you pick them out?

Combined with the salt, it created a stunning result. She was very deliberate with each color choice and technique she made throughout the process and was very proud of her finished result. I don't blame her.

Then there was this piece. For all my talk of "draw the butterfly big", she did the exact opposite with flare. It was a great opportunity to show the kids how making the butterfly small when everything else is large still puts the focus on the butterfly. The size combined with the color decisions she made created a wonderful result.

And finally the lone boy in the room, the birthday girls' big brother, who wanted nothing to do with butterflies. I gave him some bug reference to take a look at and he decided on created a centipede work.

Lots of singing, lots of yelling, lots of fun. Thank you Miss C for letting me take part in your special day.  

Happy 8th Birthday!!!