Warm and Cool Paintings

This project was inspired by a tutorial at Art Bar Blog, where you can find many wonderful ideas for working with children. Her tutorial is more comprehensive than mine, so I would recommend checking it out. The Kindergarteners started with heavy 10 x 15" sheets of watercolor paper. I used blue painter's tape to mask out a border all around the edge. the children also used the tape to block off areas of their paintings. I explained to the children that we were going to focus on abstract shapes, no paintings of the sun or their families. We started with only warm colors and on the second day, after everything was dry, we added the cool colors. I stressed that we were aiming for a variety of shapes in different sizes. The last phase was giving them small brushes and white and black paint to add detail. We used tempera initially, but it was runny so we switched to acrylic. Wash out the acrylic as soon as the children are done or your brushes will be ruined. The brushes that we used had stiff bristles.

 

Some tips: If you leave the painter's tape on the paper for too long, some of the paper will peel away with the tape. The same thing has happened to me when I have been painting a wall! The next time I do this project, I will do a more extensive demo for the children since they didn't entirely grasp the concept of the tape blocking out areas. I found that they were carefully painting on top of the tape. They also had to be prompted to paint right over the tape along the border.