Watercoloring with Youngins: Project Two

As I said in post one on this theme, I am teaching a watercolor class to the 6-9 year olds in my homeschooling co-op this year, and we are focusing on some simple techniques to make watercolors more enjoyable and less frustrating. Let's face it: most kids love to paint with watercolors but most also struggle with the results.

For you, as a mom, I recommend getting Bobbi Dubbins' DVD from my bookstore. This DVD is not geared towards children, but it is full of such basic and helpful information, helping your child learn watercolors will be much simpler.

Our materials are the same as for the first project, with us starting off with watercolor paper taped onto a drawing board, table top, or piece of foam board with masking tape. The set up includes some paper towel for cleaning our brushes between colors, two cups of clean water, and a water color palate. We also have some ok-quality brushes (not the cheap ones that come with the water color sets). To save money, I bought a set of water color tubes, and I filled the palates that way...in the long run it saves money, and the color quality is better.

Project Two was designed to show the students that if you pre-wet your paper only in certain areas or in certain shapes, the colors will fill that area, and stay within the boundaries.

To start, I took a clean brush, with clean water, and painted a simple shape on the paper (in this case, a heart).


Because the point of this is to show them how the colors all will run together yet stay in the boundaries, I dabbed on a selection of colors into the heart, painting them gently, but mostly letting the wet paper inside of the heart shape pull the color around to fill the heart up.



If you need to, gently (emphasis on GENTLY) tilt the board to let the water colors run in empty areas within your shape.

If you are too overloaded in an area, you can gently (there's that word again) take a corner of paper toweling and absorb some of it, and again let it blend in that area. Water color paper is super hearty, and allows you to make these corrections, but most other paper will not.

Next, we paint on a border of some sort, first in plain water, and then adding colors, and letting them blend.



I also traced around my heart with water, leaving a very slight empty area, which keeps the colors from blending together. When you are painting and you don't want two objects to smear together into one, don't connect them. Leave a very thin area of plain paper between the two, until they are both dry (you can go back in later and fix them...we'll learn about that another time).