Spring Session 2011- Week Eight

Swimming the Sea Watercolors and Foil Fish

Since May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month we thought we would give a nod to that culture by doing a project that dealt with the ocean, fish, and watercolors. This is a great project to do for the texture alone. It creates beautiful and to some extent random textures on your watercolor painting. Once you paint your picture and it is still wet sprinkle some salt on it and the result is magical and amazing. You just need to let it dry first and then wipe away all of the salt to reveal the beauty it has left behind. We used this technique only on the ocean/water part of the painting to imitate waves and those great white-caps that you see in water and the ocean. We then had them do the sky whatever color they wanted, and however they viewed the sky to be. Some did sunsets, some did blue skies, and some created wonderful patterns for the sky. We then had the children cut out their water/waves and glue them onto their sky. The next part of the project was to create the fish out of foil. We did a rubbing technique for create fish scales on the foil. We used old netting from fruit and candy and taped it onto some cardboard then placed a piece of foil over it. The children then rubbed with the backs of their finger nails to emboss the foil with the "scale" pattern for the fish. We used sharpies to draw over fish over the scales and it create a pretty convincing fish. In one class we had a little extra time this week, so we played some bingo in the last few minutes. A great way to pass some time and keep the kids focused.