Oceans & Watery Landscapes Part 1 & 2

After talking about some of the artists that liked to do ocean paintings from our Usborne Art Book

(Caspar David Friedrich and Winslow Homer are two artists we talked about,, along with just looking at some of these paintings. We loved looking at the different colors and textures Winslow Homer used in his sea pictures, and tried to guess what the weather and mood were like in his paintings.) 

Our project for the day was this one.

We started by using several shades of acrylic craft paint & glitter paint that we saw in the paintings, and painted a thick piece of white cardstock with them. We used stamps, sponges, bubble wrap, thick brushes, and dye spray... anything that would give dimension. It's important that we cover all the paper with color! 

We used watercolor paper and blue water colors for the sky. Again, covering the whole paper was important. For the sand, sponges and a couple of shades of cream, yellow, and brown on a piece of cardstock made the sand. 

We let those pieces dry... and the next time we had art lessons, it was time for part two of our project! 

First we tore our ocean pieces into strips. You have to show the kiddos how to do one long strip, otherwise they'll try to tear small pieces. Once you get them started, they can do it! It's cool to show them how tearing one way doesn't have a white edge, but tearing the other way does. 

We glued down our ocean pieces onto our blue sky watercolor paper with mod podge, then repeated the process with the sand pieces. I helped them trim off any overlap off the sides of the watercolor paper.  Next came gluing down the pieces to the little sail boat (I cut them out for them)... then the fun part! 

We took our art work outside, and I brought out a small cup with water and white acrylic paint mixed together and a large paintbrush. I showed them how to fling the paint (watch out- it gets messy) to add "water spray" to their pages. It was so fun and I think we'll have to do another modern art piece with only splatters some time soon! 

This was such a rewarding piece of work. So cute how it turned out!