Warm Cool Watercolour Grid Paintings

One of my all time favourite watercolour projects! I teach this to Grade 7,8,9 and it gives them a good grasp of how colours work well together (analogous and warm vs. cool) and also brush control when using watercolours. 

I posted this project previously HERE and HERE.

Students measure a grid onto heavy white paper. The smaller the grid, the longer and more challenging it is to paint essentially.  So it's a good project for differentiation.

Then they draw an image onto the grid. I leave the subject matter up to them. They just need to make sure to fill the page effectively. Then they paint it using watercolours- I typically encourage warm versus cool colours but you could use any type of colour combinations really. 

Some finished works:

 

Poppies Collage for Remembrance Day

This is a new poppy project I tried this year wiht my Grade 4-6 students. In all honesty, it was too easy for them, but we needed a quick project we could do in one period (80 minutes) and this fit the bill.

The only part that needed to be completed the class before was the students making the textured grey background paper.

I altered this project slightly from the one I saw on the fellow Canadian website 'That Artist Woman".

See her post with all the steps HERE.

We used really watered down grey tempera paint mixed with silver metallic paint. 

Water it down to a runny cream consistency. 

Cover with plastic wrap, make lots of wrinkles and let dry a few hours. 

When you peel of the plastic wrap, you get a really cool textured pattern.

Using painted green paper, students cut out long, thin, wobbly stems as well as jagged leaves. 

Glue those down.

Using red tissue paper, students cut out three different sized circles and 

layered them together and glued them down. 

Cut out black paper and glue in the center.

You can see the bouquet of poppies that we looked at beforehand, to get a good sense of what poppies look like in real life.

Grade 4-6 results!

 

Leaves of Gratitude Fall Thanksgiving Bulletin Board Window Display

While Canada and the United States share many holidays – including Christmas and Labour Day – Canadian and American Thanksgivings are held almost two months apart. Ours was held on October 14th and in the U.S, it's on November 28th. Canada’s celebration has often been credited to it getting colder the further north you go – and therefore having an earlier harvest. The day is still all about gratitude and giving thanks in both countries (and a turkey dinner and pumpkin pie!)

 

I saw these table place cards at Dollarama and was inspired to create a window display involving all students and staff from our school. The office staff distributed them to all the homeroom teachers and they had students write on them something they were grateful for. Then, a colleague and I hung them on windows in a naturalistic swirling motion using scotch tape. 

It added a nice autumnal touch to our hallway and received many compliments!