Head's Up For Next Week!

 Hello again parents and students!

I'm not going to see you this week since there's not school on Friday, but I wanted to give you a heads up on the Ocean Watercolor project we're going to be doing.  I found this wonderful project on the Blog, buggyandbuddy.com which is full of wonderful art ideas, and it encapsulated exactly what Ms. Butikofer and I wanted to do, so I thought I would pass it along to you all to get you excited for our project!

Take a look below, and I'll see you all next week!   

Painting with Watercolor

Ocean Art Project for Kids Using Oil Pastels, Watercolor, and Salt

Materials for Ocean Art Project for Kids

• watercolors (
• Paintbrush
• Oil Pastels 
• Salt 
• Art paper 
• Scissors
• Glue

How to Make Ocean Art for Kids

1. Draw lots of white, wavy lines across your art paper using a white oil pastel. (The set from Discount School Supply actually came with three white oil pastels, which I loved since we use those most often with the watercolors.)

2. Set out some liquid watercolor paint in different shades of blue. We used blue, teal, and turquoise. 

3. Paint a blue watercolor wash over your sheet of art paper using any shades of blue you’d like.

4. Before your paint dries, sprinkle some salt over the paper. As the paint dries, really cool designs will appear in your paint.

5. Set your ocean water paper aside to dry and begin making your ocean animals. Use another sheet of art paper and oil pastels to draw any sea creatures you’d like.

6. Paint your drawings with liquid watercolor paint. The kids always love seeing how the oil pastel drawings resist the watercolor paint!

7. Once your sea animals are dry, cut them out.

8. Glue them onto your salt ocean artwork, and let it dry.

Display your finished creation!

Tips

• When sprinkling the salt onto your ocean painting, don’t do huge piles of salt or put the salt on dry sections of your paper- designs will be less likely to appear.
• When we’re using lots of different colors of liquid watercolor paint at once, we put the different colors in an ice cube tray. It makes for easy cleanup and can be used again and again!
• The liquid watercolor paint is very brilliantly colored straight from the bottle. You can lighten the colors by adding water to the paints you’ll be using.
• Don’t leave younger children out of this activity. Theo (age 4) loved making his salty ocean painting. Although he is not quite ready to draw ocean animals, he drew his own designs which were ocean animals in his eyes!
• When choosing art paper for this project, be sure to use a paper that is meant for watercolors. Construction paper will tear easily as it gets wet. I was very happy withThe Ultimate Art Paper from Discount School Supply. It’s very inexpensive so I know I’ll be buying it in the future, and it even dried without curling which is a huge plus!