The 6th Grade Art class at New Buffalo Middle School is a group of students with playful imaginations. They love to share stories during mask breaks and are excited when it's time to start making art after the opening instructions. This inner joy seemed to explode with enthusiasm when they were given the opportunity to experiment with watercolors!
The "Head in the Clouds" Watercolor project was an introduction to color mixing, color schemes, and abstract art. We began the unit with the question, "Have you ever looked up into the sky and recognized a shape or image in the clouds?" Oh, the stories they each wanted to share with the group! We discussed how the clouds are always changing and don't actually represent anything specific, but that our brains process visual information in a way that identifies meaning and makes it seem as if there are unexpected images like dragons, horses, or faces shaped in the clouds.
Watercolor is a wonderful medium to replicate this phenomenon with its fluid, cloud-like quality and layers of transparency in the pigment interacting with water. After reviewing color theory and color schemes, students were taught the wet-into-wet watercolor technique where the paper is first painted with water only before introducing watercolor paint to the blank page. The sixth graders were given a day to experiment with wet-into-wet combinations of contrasting and similar colors. They pooled droplets of color within other puddles of paint and rotated the canvas so that paint would roll off the page in different directions and create shapes.
When they found a color scheme that worked well together, it was time to build up the final piece with the techniques they had mastered. The following days involved analyzing the work they had created and recognizing shapes in the watermarks made by layers of paint. It was exciting for them to discover a creature, the Michigan mitt, or a “man with a belly” and outline the shape made by watercolor with colored pencil or pen.
We spent part of class in a critique where students used the document camera to display their works-in-progress onto the smartboard so that the rest of the class could see what the artist had drawn into their artwork. Sometimes other students saw new images in the non-objective design and pointed them out much like gazing up at the clouds and imagining scenes that shapeshift and roll by.
It was the artist’s personal choice of how much they wanted to outline and identify shapes in the final piece. I liked seeing a variety of work and that some artists preferred to create non-objective designs with patterns and organic shapes instead of specific drawings of cartoons or people.
On the last day of the project, the students documented their work by uploading a photo of the piece to Schoology and answered self-reflection questions on the artistic process and outcome of their watercolor paintings. It was satisfying for me to read their responses and see how imaginative they can be with simply water, paint, and colored pencils.
“My artwork makes me feel like I’m in a dream. I chose the colors of a sunset with red, yellow, and orange. I found all sorts of funny animals and creatures. I learned that if you move around water, the colors drip and make all sorts of cool shapes. I saw a chick, a heart, a ghost wearing a small hat, another ghost wearing a cowboy hat, a spaceship, a bunny, a seahorse, a sea serpent, a bow, a heel, and an anteater in a shell. I thought I did a good job moving around all the colors.”
- 6th Grade Student
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