Proteas Pretty

Today one of my students brought beautiful King Proteas from his family’s protea farm. 

 When we looked at them we saw a soft fluff on the petals.  And the centre of the flower was so patterned it was more like a texture to draw.  Since the flowers were so vibrant in colour, so soft to the touch and so part of our country I decided the only medium to draw them in today were chalk pastels. 

With these we were able to draw both the hard and the soft (smudging).  Both the pastel and the super bright colours.  And as a bonus we could blend to our heart’s delight.

We drew on black card to bounce the intensity of the colour out.  We used the chalk pastel to draw the outlines so there would be no pencil showing. 

These little grade threes really impressed me.

Dream Trees

This idea came around while looking through tree paintings on the internet.  There are so many creative and crazy trees.

Mediums and materials:  Brown packaging paper (not like the shiny-sided normal brown paper), charcoal, chalk pastel, glue and gold paper.

Method:  Start by looking through the inspiring trees you saved into a file from the internet.  Start the tree in charcoal, describing how the tree trunk is the largest part and the tree becomes thinner and thinner as the trunk becomes branches.  Fill the tree with beautiful line patterns (in charcoal still).  The patterns have 3 tones – dark black, medium smudge and plain paper.  The background is then completely covered in the bright and colourful chalk pastel.  I really made an effort to show them how to correctly smudge the chalk.  Carefully and without the colour blending too much as that can look really unpleasant. 

Ideally one colour should not overlapp the others or a catstrophic mess is the result.  also should the kids get too rough with the smudging the colour tends to move to their hands and cloths rather than the page leaving them with dull pictures and bright cloths and hands.

We added gold paper as leaves to the trees.  We looked at the trees outside noting how we cannot see the complete branches because the leaves overlap them and eachother.  THIS was not easily reflected in their art.  These kids seemed determined to not add “to many” leaves.  I think they were feeling lazy! Or I didn’t enthuse them about it enough at all!

Most beautiful outcomes.  You do however need a good supply of hair spray or fixative spray.