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Kids draw flowers with a marker and use liquid watercolor paints to add glorious color

How to Draw & Paint a Bouquet of Flowers

80

Min

HOW TO DRAW & PAINT A BOUQUET OF FLOWERS

Kids draw flowers with a marker and use liquid watercolor paints to add glorious color

Learning how to draw flowers is a must in any art room. To make the lesson easy for a younger child, it helps to start with some type of template. Don’t feel like you’re cheating. My philosophy with templates is that sometimes they help a child get through a part they may find a bit boring (drawing yet another flower) to the fun part: watercolor resist.

Liquid watercolor paints get a good deal of use in my art room. So much in fact, that I keep watercolor-filled baby food jars at the ready in my cupboard.  When trying to decide whether to use liquid watercolors or tray watercolors, consider what your intention is for the art lesson.

For this lesson I had three watercolor goals:

  • Proper application of a wash
  • Intense colors
  • Oil pastel resist

Wash: Tray watercolors are hard to use when you want to paint a wash as the children need to mix their colors into the tray cover and then add the mixed paint to the large area of background.

Intense Color: You can dial up the intensity or water it down. Kids have a bit of control by adding more water to their brush if they want. But basically, if you want strong colors, you just don’t add as much water to your mixing cup or jar.

Resist: Because the kids just have to dip their brushes into the colored water, applying the soaked brush over oil pastel is an easy job.

To see what I mean, test this out yourself. Try this lesson using tray watercolors then try again using liquid watercolors.

Kids draw flowers with a marker and use liquid watercolor paints to add glorious color

Before the watercolor fun begins, you first have to draw something. I gave each child a pencil, waterproof black marker and a piece of 12″ x 18″ watercolor paper.

I used a flower bouquet template that I had on hand from a lesson I did for my Art School for Kid’s program. The flower template really comes in handy when you want your little seven and eight year olds to create a large scale drawing. Oftentimes a template can anchor a size and help the child with scale. Sometimes this can be achieved by using a vase template.

Kids draw flowers with a marker and use liquid watercolor paints to add glorious color

ART SUPPLIES

  • You’ll need a 12″ x 18″ piece of white drawing paper (76lb)
  • Oil Pastels (non water-soluble)
  • Liquid watercolor paints
  • Medium round brush

WATERCOLOR FLOWER

After drawing in pencil, the children outlined their lines with a Sharpie or waterproof black marker. I set a tray of crayons on the table (sharp ones are best) and the kids outlined some of their lines with white crayon and added as many patterns and lines as they wished.

The next session was used to paint the flowers with liquid watercolor. Mixing was encouraged. It’s hard to keep the colors pristine in a large classroom setting so don’t fuss too much about this but you can always encourage cleaning the brush between color choices.

Here is a quick video that shows the basic steps of this project:

Here are some lovely examples of how my seven and eight year old students used templates to draw their own selection of flowers and then mixed watercolor paints to create their own unique piece. Aren’t they lovely?

Kids draw flowers with a marker and use liquid watercolor paints to add glorious color. Kids art gallery

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  • kpcarney@verizon.net

    Where can I get the flower template mentioned for the watercolor flower project?
    Thanks!

    • Patty Palmer

      It’s embedded into one of my Art School for Kids lessons. But it was easy to make. Just a rounded petal flower cut from card stock.
      I like to keep all my templates in a plastic zip lock bag. Over the years I have accumulated so many. You can use them for clay, too.

      • Barbara

        Card stock doesn’t hold up for me but I save the cardboard from cereal boxes for making templates. The kids usually giggle when they use them!

  • Manda

    I want to draw flowers with kindergarteners. Should I focus on drawing one kind altogether or observe several and let them explore drawing their own invention?

  • Ruth

    Thank you so much for all the resources and lessons you provide. I love teaching art and with your help, the art lessons come out marvelous!

    • Patty

      So happy to hear this, Ruth!

  • Laura

    Can I just use regular crayons — will that work? Or does it have to be oil pastels?

    • Patty

      Yes! Just use wax crayons. There are SO many types of crayons on the market today and not all are wax crayons. So fancy now! Just do a test with some watercolor paint and crayon marks to see if there is a resist.

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