Autumn Leaves Watercolour

This is a lovely Autmnal watercolour lesson that I found HERE on the "Colorful Art Palette" blog. I tweaked it a little by using liquid watercolours for the whole project, whereas she used black wax crayon for the background.

I did this lesson with a mixed class of Grades 4-6. They started off by drawing a leaf (the oak leaf was BY FAR the most popular one!) on a piece of cardstock. They cut this out and this was used as their tracer or template. Some students chose to do more than one leaf.

They traced their leaf onto heavy white paper. We talked about how to visually create a sense of movement on their art, like the leaves were gently blowing in the wind. Once all their leaves were drawn, they outlined everything in Sharpie.

I finally order liquid watercolours this year. I read THIS POST a while back on the amazing Deep Space Sparkle blog and she gave such great ideas on how to use them that I finally bit the bullet. It took a while to track down the sauce/condiment cups with lids (my Costco doesn't stock them) but I finally found a wholesale restaurant supply store that sells them. TIP: take you tempera puck tray with you to the store as there were many sauce cup sizes to choose from and I initially bought a size too big. So I took one tray with me the next time and got a better size. The sauce cups (with lids) are great for storing mixed acrylic paints as well- my high schoolers use them alot to save paint from class to class.

I bought the brand "Handy Art" liquid watercolours. Overall, I'm happy with them, but the black colour is definitely not black- more like a navy blue as you'll see in the finished artwork below. Next time I guess I'll bust out my black India ink for the background step, but it's so stinky (and stains) that I generally don't like using it with my younger students. 

Anyhoo, my students loved the liquid watercolours and request to use them alot now!

It took a couple classes to paint the leaves.

The last step is to paint the background. We went with "black" (not really) but blue or turquoise would also be really pretty.

Some of the early finished ones:

this student gave their background 2 coats of paint to make it more opaque. I prefer this.