Dragons and Sunflower Finished Art

 I'm posting the finished dragon paintings from yesterday here.

Yesterday we used paint and painted paper for our finished art. Today with the older group and a little longer class time I added a preliminary step to the process. Students used oil pastels to draw their flower centers, stems and leaves. We applied our flower petals using the same technique but the oil pastel resisted the wet paint allowing our centers, stems and leaves to peek out from behind the petals. My older artists got very creative with their dragons. We had a low relief dragon created by folding and bending the paper to stand out against the painted background. We had dragon's the emerged outside of the traditional picture plain some subtly, others more so. I'd love to say that I have a favourite (I actually do, one of the finished artworks below was created by one of my own children, as a mom hers is my favourite. I think it's amazing.) but as an art instructor I see amazing things in each finished art work posted below, and also the other two paintings that were still too wet to hang up when I took these photos. Watching today's artwork unfold I was very excited to see all the different directions my young artists were going with their art.

Dragons and Sunflowers for Swords

Last year the Art Sparks and Arts Enrichment classes did a project based on Perfect Square; the book I read with my Art Exploration Students on Saturday.

I make an effort to keep lesson topics fresh and to revisit techniques instead of subjects so instead of continuing with the same book for today and tomorrow's lesson I introduced The Sunflower Sword by Mark Sperring and illustrated by  Miriam Latimer. I built a Dragon Themed birthday party around this book last year which was a big hit. Today I focused on the spread in the book that had the dragon flying over top of a giant field of blooming sunflowers.

In my garden I have a lovely patch of sunflowers this year. The bright yellow petals surrounding the smaller blossoms set out in a Fibonacci spiral are beautiful in and of themselves. Adding a dragon to the composition is a full on winner with my own little artists as well as the artists in my classes.

We started with an application of yellow and orange paint with sponges and also foam shaped stamps. I then instructed my artists to add the brown centres of the flowers with a round brush. The opportunity to bled the brown paint provided with the still wet oranges and yellows was taken by a handful of artists in the lesson and the brush work they used added energy  and interest to their compositions. A few other artists were more interested in precise application of the brown and others were more interested in applying the yellow and orange and only a small amount or no brown was added at all. Our next step was to use scissors and painted paper scraps to cut out the shapes to build our own dragon. The dragon was glued onto our under painting and a final addition of a googly eye ( or three, or five or two) was added.

Regardless of what steps were taken or left out in the process each of my young artist friends learned a little bit about texture, pattern and shapes today. It is always really fascinating to see the ideas of children this age emerge onto paper.

Once the finished works are dry I will post some examples.