Painting and Screen printing

In today’s episode the children enjoyed painting and preparing their stencils for screen-printing.

I learned something today: As discussed in my last painting Blog, I mentioned about some children found it hard to blend colours while painting their face; plus they found if difficult to not paint over their preliminary guidelines. Today most children mixed colours and started to blend colours without having blobs of colour in various places on the face. Having three colours to blend still remained a problem.
Next time, to help children learn to blend the colours without making mud colours, I will only have them use two colours. We will start with yellow and red by doing the mid tone, and then use the yellow as the light. After the painting has dried I will then introduce dry brushing and put in the shadows with blue. I think this will make the paint more controllable for the children.

The master designs of the screen-printing are all looking very individual artworks. It has been a challenge for the children to understand the concept of screen-printing. By using the example of stencils, showing the children how the cut out part is where the colours goes, has helped them to make their own paper stencils for the different colours they intend using on their artwork.

No photos today, I was allowing the children to experiment with their art.

Reflective comments from the children:

“I learnt that when you are painting a face and you make the lines curve it looks better.” Caleb

“I learnt how to paint dark to middle to light tones”. Jesse

“I learned there are shadows on our face and the face is curved”. Jada

“I learnt to draw a nose. I learnt by looking at Jessica nose and seeing that her nose doesn’t look like a pigs hoof. I looked at mine and I change it.” Louise

“I learnt how to draw a proper mouth. I learnt how to draw a mouth by looking gat my mouth in the mirror.” Jessica

“I learnt that blue and red and yellow are primary colours. I learned that red is a tone colour and blue is a shadow colour and yellow is a light colour. Grey and brown are earth colours.” Paul

Sketching

The students used pencil to sketch themselves while looking in a mirror to check their features. We talked about proportion, shapes and size. When sketching a buddy they observed details they missed when drawing themselves. Next the students sketched themselves by feeling their own face. This helped them understand features that stick out, others that are indented and the roundness of face and neck.

To get away from the restriction of pencil, the students had to sketch with charcoal, crayon and then paint. The focus of the white paint sketches on black paper was to highlight the shadow and light.

The coloured paintings are a work in progress. The students were given only primary colours. The yellow being the light tone, red mid tone and the blue shadow tone. They used yellow to draw the preliminary outline shapes.
Once they filled in the face with red they wanted to keep the colour pure and were very reluctant to blend in the yellow and blue. It was as if they were colouring the face like a colouring in book. They also would not paint over the preliminary lines.
When the students started painting a few of them forgot to use the correct proportions and the feature outlines looked like very young children's drawing, even through they had drawn the features correctly in pencil.
Interestingly, these students have not got the same observational skills as the students who had no problems getting shapes and proportions correct in pencil and paint.

The next learning step is to have a model and get the students to draw a range of facial expressions and viewpoints with paint. Give them a short time (5minutes) to draw each one. During the session have the students identify what has made their sketch look good, what they improved and how could they improve the sketch next time. Have them also share their painting and talk about them to a peer. Thus developing skills to self evaluation and problem solve.