Winter Trees for the Holiday Show!

Hope everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving! 

It was a nice long break and the kids seemed excited to be back in class. Now that Thanksgiving has past, it is time for us to start thinking about the artwork for the holiday show! We will hang two projects. One will be the winter animals that the kids finished before the break. The second project is a landscape scene with evergreen trees and we began working on that today.

The kids started class working on watercolor landscapes. We focused solely on the background, filling in the sky and ground with blocks of color. Although there were no specific parameters around color choice, when we talked about what time of day we were thinking of painting most of the kids were excited by the idea of sunset. That opened the pictures up to all pretty much every color in the rainbow. You should all be proud to know that the children worked well together sharing these lovely watercolor sets.

After we finished up the backgrounds, the kids had the fun of painting with glue on white watercolor paper and sticking green squares of tissue paper all over. I encouraged them to fill the space with color but it isn't easy to do. This part of the project gets sticky really fast. Next week we will cut evergreen trees from the green tissue paper pages and arrange them on the watercolor backgrounds. The kids can then decorate the trees and sky as they like with some mixed media materials I have on hand.

At the end of each class, there is normally between five and ten minutes of free time. During this time the kids can work in their sketchbooks, exploring ideas from the days class or following their own interests. We had a full ten minutes today and I wanted to share just a few of the drawings that were created today.

I absolutely love watching the kids work, especially in these moments where nothing in particular is expected of them. It is so amazing to see what interests them and how they approach a blank piece of paper. I love watching the interactions between them also. It is such a treat to witness the kids admiration for each others work and how they share what they know when asked.