Cherry Blossom Paintings

My Grade 7 class recently finished these cherry blossom paintings as part of our "Japanese Art" unit.  I absolutely adore cherry blossom paintings- I think they're very stylish and feminine. I also love anything Japanese related, so I really enjoy teaching this unit. And believe it or not, the blossoms are just finishing up here where I live. Yes, in June.

We started off by watching a video about the Cherry Blossom festival in Japan known as Hanami ('flower viewing').  In the spring, thousands of people fill the parks to hold feasts under the flowering trees, and sometimes these parties go on until late at night. I thought it was interesting to find out that most public schools have cherry blossom trees outside of them.

Cherry blossoms have been used extensively in Japanese art for hundreds of years. According to the Buddhist tradition, the brief beauty of the blossoms symbolizes the transient nature of life as the flowers last for at most a few weeks. The cherry blossom is also tied with the samurai culture, representing the fleeting nature of the samurai’s life and symbolic of drops of blood.

So for this lesson students created a scroll-like painting of a cherry blossom branch using the classic 'blow paint through a straw' technique. You can find this technique all over the internet and Art teachers have been using this technique for eons. We first created a blue sky background (on long strips of white paper) with a faint full moon silhouette by placing a small circle container (in this case yoghurt) and painting around it with light blue tempera paint.

 

While the sky paper is drying, student practiced painting (tempera paint) cherry blossoms

in their sketchbooks. 

I demonstrated how to mix various tints of pink (always add the darker colour, red, a bit at a time, to the white- not the other way around). The blossoms: as long as they had five petals, students could paint them however they wanted and in whatever tint of pink. (You could also do plum blossoms in tints of purple).

Once the sky paper is dry, student blew watery brown tempera paint (ink-like consistency) across their paper in a branch-like shape.  I really demonstrated how to do this, as kids have a tendency to blow down as opposed to across.  If you blow downwards, you get really, erm, hairy-looking trees!!  I stress to keep it simple and follow a line of paint across the paper. Keep adding more paint and creating new branches as necessary. 

Encourage the kids to take lots of breaks as you can get really light-headed doing this!

Let these dry flat.

Next class, students paint on their cherry blossoms using tempera. 

Just add them randomly anywhere- add lots.

I own some Asian-style rubber stamp 'chops' or seals- which is basically the artists signature.

They are stamps or seals used in lieu of an artists signature in Asian art.

They are typically made of stone and used with red ink.  I have no clue what mine say and none of my Chinese students could read them either. Soooo, I just hope it's nothing rude or way wierd!

Of course, if you have lino-cutting tools, students could make their own from an eraser.

As I didn't have a red ink pad, I just squirted some red tempera onto a pad of paper towels. 

 It worked pretty good.  But an ink pad would be easier, obviously. Once these were dry, I mounted them onto larger mauve construction paper.

Here are some of the Grade 7 results: Ta da!

I displayed them with our Kimono project.