Complementary Heart Watercolors

Our homeschool co-op's second semester began this week. Since it is February, my art classes did a heart project. I got the idea from Art Projects for Kids. Her project was simply watercolor hearts painted in a grid. I decided we could use this project to review the color wheel and talk about complementary  colors. We used watercolor paper, color crayons, and watercolors. We talked about primary, secondary and tertiary colors and about complimentary colors. We talked again about how watercolors should be transparent not opaque. Learning to mix the pigment with water to create a wash seems to be a hard concept for some kids to grasp.

The kids were to outline hearts in a grid shape with color crayons and then watercolor wash the centers with their complimentary colors. It seemed easiest for them to draw all of the hearts at once, pressing hard to outline them. Then they were to mix up their complimentary colors  and paint in all the red, then all the green, then blue and so on. By doing all of the same color at once, it is much easier to finish in a short class period.

Then, as so often happens, one child did something different and I liked his plan as much or better than mine. (See above.) Jack  colored in his hearts and then watercolor washed the complimentary color over them. Looks great!