Straw Paintings

This week’s Creative Art project was learning about a Dutch painter named Hendrick Avercamp. He lived over 400 years ago. During his life, landscape paintings were in great demand and Mr. Avercamp  specialized in winter scenes. He was very fond of adding details such as the castle that look read to his paintings, but weren’t. The castle was only in his imagination! Wow!  (Interesting fact about him: he was deaf and never learned to speak.)

(Photo by The National Gallery)

Our challenge was to create a winter scene of bare trees that are realistic looking like the one in the painting above.  Doesn’t look too hard, does it??  Oy!

Materials needed:

Table covering

Watercolors in tubes (we used the blues and browns)

Water and Mixing Trays

Watercolor Brushes

Watercolor Paper

Straws

Paper towels

How we did it:

1. Mix blue paint with water. You are looking for runny paint (but not too thin). 

2. Spread it across the top part of the paper to create a sky.

3. Take a paintbrush dripped in water and let it drip onto the sky. It will run and cause a cloud effect when it is dry.

4. Mix a runny brown color paint and make little hills on the bottom. It should look like the dirt is showing under the drifted snow.

5. Let it dry.

6. When it is dry, mix some fairly runny dark brown paint.  Drop (or dab) a blob on your ground area.

7.  Take a straw and gently start to blow on the blob. It should push the paint up and away from you.

8.  Continue to push your paint with your straw-breath.  It will branch off and create the look you are going for.

9. Continue adding trees and grass (smaller versions of the trees) until you are satisfied with your artwork.

This is harder than it looks – but it is a lot of fun!

Here’s the finished projects:

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