We had our first real, watercolor lesson today. That is, using real, richly pigmented, tube paints as opposed to pale, discount store, pan paints.
Now you might think, that since I recently finished painting 100+ illustrations with similar watercolors (for the new book), that my children would have been exposed to these beautiful hues before now. Well, I am sorry to say, not really. Amelia has played with tube paints a bit, but the boys didn't seem interested, so I never bothered.
But today, I bothered... and what a hit! We kept the first lesson short n' sweet and had only one spilled water glass during the whole 30 minutes.
This is an overview of lesson #1:
- Intro to the type of paints and paper we will be using.
- Instruction on the care and use of the brushes and paper.
- Placed a bit of only the 3 primary colors onto their pallets.
- Showed everyone how to add a bit of water (the small squirt bottle) to the pigment and mix well.
- Taught them how to take a bit of paint from yellow and blue to make green. (Then we did purple.)
- Introduced (well, they had seen it hanging around before) the color wheel and how to use it.
- Introduced the terms "hue" and "value".
- Everyone made "stripes" across the paper getting a feel for the medium and for how much paint the different brushes hold.
- Talked about how watercolors dry lighter and to lighten them we add water, not white.
- Everyone experimented with mixing different colors with and without the help of the color wheel. (They were amazed at what could be done with only three colors.)
- Painted strips of color across the lines we had made ("plaids") to see how the colors blended as they intersected. Did this with wet over wet and wet over dry.
Now, if anyone has a suggestion for good book on teaching kids watercolor, I would love to hear it. I am pretty much flying by the seat of my pants here, using my adult watercolor books to get me started. I have got lesson #2 basically mapped out, but after that I'm not yet sure which direction I'm going to go. Maybe I'll start on a few of the exercises from Watercolor for the Artistically Undiscovered. I really want to keep this light and fun, but I want them to know a little more than just slapping paint on a page. Got any ideas? :-)
