Fall Landscape Paintings

I wanted to show Elementary students how to draw and paint a landscape scene in watercolor. With the beautiful cooler weather we are having here in Florida, I thought a fall landscape would be lovely.  I used this lesson as my starting point (thank you, Kathy Barbro) and discussed foreground, middleground, and background when drawing landscapes of any kind.  Students learned about how the clouds look smaller as they get lower in the sky and closer to the land.  This is the opposite of how things appear on land. They also learned wet in wet watercolor technique and wax resist.  They are so bright and colorful. I love using the Crayola Educational watercolors because they teach students to learn how to prepare watercolor and mix them instead of using directly from the palette.

This young lady decided to the landscape to a desert scene and spatter painted part of it for texture, turning a drippy mistake into an advantage!

Wolf Kahn

Towards the end of the school year, we studied the magnificent color field paintings of Wolf Kahn.  Color field painters want you to first see the color as the primary subject matter.  Although most color field painters work  non-objectively, Kahn does abstract landscapes.  I love how he keeps things simple and bounces/repeats the color from one color field to another.  Students created their own color field pastel paintings and here is some of their beautiful work.

Pastel Cactus

I absolutely love pastels and the bold effects you can create with this luminous medium, especially on black paper.  Students grades 2-5 worked on these beautiful cactus learning value with light and shadow.  Thank you to Art Projects for Kids for the project idea.  They worked with pastel, but used a black oil pastel to emphasize some of the lines.  I hope you enjoy viewing these as much as I did.  Kids are such fabulous artists!