watercolor mixed media birds

In the bird themed art camp, I had decided to take advantage of the beautiful sunny weather and have the kids create a project that started off with some printmaking using the sun.

This was inspired by a project I did last year on B.C.Binning that the kids enjoyed.

I started by introducing some of the cut paper creations by Matisse and had the kids share what they saw in the many organic shapes. And here is where I made a terrible mistake.

I did not have any black construction paper, but did have some black pastel paper. To me, this seemed like a logical substitution to use when having the kids cut out their organic leaf shapes inspired by Matisse.

Once each child had cut out their shapes from the black pastel paper, they laid some watercolors down in either warm or cool colors with a wet on wet technique. Then they dipped the black pastel paper into a bowl of water, wiped off the excess water, and placed them on the still wet watercolor background they had created and put the whole project out into the sun to dry.

Now what was suppose to happen was white shapes would be left on the dry paper everywhere they had put the black pastel paper.

What did happen was the black pastel paper left grey shapes all over the paper. Definitely not what anyone was expecting and left me scrambling on what to do next with the project.

Originally I was not going to start offering a lot of different materials to add to the background with this project. The kids were simply going to cut out the birds they created in watercolors and glue it down on top of the printed paper, but now that we had a muddy grey mess of shapes I knew we needed to do something to liven up the background.

8 year old

So I reminded the kids of the studio mantra, "mistakes are great" and told them it was time to put on our creative thinking caps and create something better. I threw out every art material and the kitchen sink onto the table and let them begin to play with the backgrounds until they were happy.

6 year old

We used chalk pastel.

7 year old

We used india ink.

5 year old

We used white gel pens.

7 year old

And even added plain ol' graphite.

7 year old

And you know what? They started looking quite interesting. There was a lot of depth to the works of art and by the time the kids glued down the pen and ink watercolor birds they had created on top, turned out quite beautiful.

9 year old

A great lesson to prove to kids not to be afraid of mistakes and for the art teacher to always have some black construction paper on hand in the studio.