Older children will love getting creative and putting together this brightly-coloured winter scene. You could adapt it for younger children by reducing the different types of trees.
Time: 30 minutes
Age: Over 10's
Level: Medium
Materials
Watercolour paper or thick cartridge paper
Water-soluble felt-tip pens in blue, green, and purple
Note: The felt-tip pens must be water-soluble or you won’t be able to create the effect with the trees at the end. Most of my pen were permanent but my daughter’s art set had some good water-soluble ones in ones of different colours.
Method
Using a large sheet of watercolour or thick cartridge paper, start by using a blue felt-tip to draw some skeletal deciduous trees with no leaves. These will be the biggest trees and so should go on first. An easy way to draw skeletal trees is to make each branch half as small as the last. Make sure the trees are bending in the wind in different directions to add interest to the picture. Also, make sure you leave space at the top of the picture for hills and sky.
Next, use a green felt-tip pen to draw the fir trees. These are simple horizontal lines getting smaller towards the top of the tree. Add a small rectangle at the bottom for a trunk.
Finally use the purple felt-tip pen to draw some more skeletal trees. These should be smaller than the blue ones and taller than they are wide.
Using a pencil, sketch some hills at the top of the picture, leaving a space for sky at the top.
Take a white wax crayon and make dots all over the paper. These will be the snowflakes when you go over the painting with watercolour paint.
Using blue watercolour paint fill in the hills in light blue colour then add a shadow under each of the trees. Leave to dry.
Using a darker blue colour (you can use the same blue as before but dilute it slightly less) paint the sky. Again, leave to dry.
Clean your paintbrush and fill up a small pot of clean water. Wet the paintbrush and brush over and the branches of the blue trees. The felt tip pen will smudge to make a tree shape on top of the branches.
Using clean water each time, repeat with the other two types of tree.
Leave to dry, and then, using the light blue watercolour again, add a path running through the trees and up to the hills.
You could also add some little animals in among the trees with brown paint.
Categories
#Over 10s
#Medium
#Winter
#Crayons
#Paint
#Painting
