Term 3 session 7

Our warm-up today involved drawing a bird with indian ink and a stick. This task lead into the days main activity; mixed media birds on the texture canvas paper we prepared last week.
The process:

1. Draw a bird with pencil onto the prepared textured paper. Add a simple background (ground, branch leaves according to habitat).

2. Using white pastel carefully colour in the bird and background feature. (This needs to be quite thick)
3. Chose a paint colour (habitat dependent) and paint all the paper except the bird - leave it white. (One child painted over the bird and it did not look as effective as the others.)
The paint needs to be watered down to the consistency of liquid dye. I did not use dye because it would seep into the grooves and the feature of the painted paper was some of the grooves (texture) stayed white.

4. Paint around the bird and the background features with thicker paint of the same colour, adding the darker tone.

5. Lastly, go around the outline of the bird with indian ink. I was not going to do this final stage, but after completing the birds, they needed something to make the bird stand out more.

I demonstrated the process and the children became the artists and created their own composition. They were amazed at their creations.