Henri Rousseau Tigers for Indian Independence Day 🇮🇳🐅

Greetings !
Learning from Masters is always a favourite art lesson for me. I had seen 'Tigers in the jungle' on Pinterest and our upcoming  Independence Day was just the right reason to give it a try. The regal tiger is India's National animal. So, I thought to myself, how perfect is this? We could learn about the French artist Henri Rousseau, look at his painting, 'Tiger in a Tropical Storm' and also paint a beautiful tiger.

I must also add that tigers are close to my heart, I was very fortunate, while on a tiger safari to the Bhandavgarh National Park in Madhya Pradesh, to have seen tigers really up and close. Their eyes have a penetrating gaze and even before you have spotted them amongst the tall elephant grass, they have seen you and are watching you! Nothing like the tiger! 
Back to our lesson. This is suitable for ages 6 and up. Before we began our zoom lesson, we looked the painting by Henri Rousseau, 'Tiger in a Tropical Storm', as also self-portrait of his.

This art lesson was done in few easy steps.

The art materials you will need are: 
Oil pastels and watercolours.

1. Begin with drawing a round shape for your tiger's face then his body with a tail by one side.

2. Next draw various plants, in the foreground, here one can explain, what is a foreground, middle ground and background. I encouraged the young artists to draw their plants going over the tiger.

3. Contour the plants with a green oil pastel and the veins of the leaves in bright oil pastels of different hues.

4. At this point, the tiger begins to look as if he is truly gazing at us from behind the leafy jungle! The parts of his face you wish to leave white, use a white oil pastel, for the rest of his face and body use black oil pastels. Do the stripes as well.

5. Time to paint the tiger, I used orange and orange mixed with chrome yellow to show two values for the tiger.

6. Paint in your leaves with the different greens in your watercolour set, mix and blend for different values.

7. I invited the young artists to think about which colour they'd like to paint their background, is the sun shining through the trees? Is it dark and cool in the forest? 

The results were superb! A tropical safari! 

Leave a comment if you liked the tiger's made my our artists or simply want to say hello😊

See you in another post!

Vegetable Garden Art 🥕

 Hello 😊 

I had seen pictures of this beautiful vegetable garden art in Pinterest world and had really been wanting to try it out with the kids. Since we would be doing it via an online class, time would be limited and we kept it to drawing just three vegetables. One could add more which would make the picture that much more interesting.

Lessons from nature are amongst my favourite to do and this art lesson ticked all the boxes, plant drawings, plant life, gardening, all checked ✔️

We chatted about other vegetables which grow underground, I heard potato, garlic! and I told them some myself, ginger, turmeric, turnip, one can go on!

During the virtual class, I used a waterproof sketch pen to draw the vegetables as the kids need to see clearly in order to follow along.  Contouring is optional.

Vegetable Garden Art.

You will need, 

• paper

• pencil

• sketch pen (optional)

• oil pastels

• watercolours

• brushes

• small bowl for water

• tea towel or paper towel.

Draw a horizon line dividing your paper into two halves, the top half will be the sky, below will be the soil. 

Below the line, that is under the ground, first draw the carrot, add roots coming out from its tapering end, then its leaves, which are small in size.  Then draw the beetroot, which is mostlyamostly round and has larger leaves. Finally the onion bulb, with little roots coming out at the bottom and its stalk growing above the ground

Colouring~ I have used both crayons and watercolours, you could use either or both. 

 

There! Now our vegetable garden is complete  with yummy veggies. What I like about this lesson is that kids could follow along with little difficulty, and they were very happy while colouring it in. I was pretty stoked with the results, all their vegggie pictures were a complete delight. I'm so glad I did this with them !😊🥕🥔🌱

Let's take a look at our little artists' veggie gardens 😊🥕 

Follow me on Instagram, my handle is brushes_and_crayons_

Hope you enjoyed our version of this art lesson.

Have a good week and see you in another post 😊🌈

Lotus Flower in Oil Pastels.

Greetings! Today India celebrates its 74th Independence day, and I wanted to tie this in with an appropriate art lesson. This year I thought we could learn how to draw our National Flower, the Lotus which also happens to be one of my favourite flowers. This drawing is symmetrical and fairly easy to do and children ages 5 and upwards can do it with a little adult guidance.

You will need

• paper

• pencil and eraser

• oil pastels

Lotus Flower in Oil Pastels

1) Draw your Lotus nice and big, keeping the paper in a vertical position, I like to tell small kids that we're going to draw an upside down rainbow. Next, do the petal in the centre, then the sides, keep drawing in more petals, lastly add, two more growing side-ways.

For the stem, draw two straight lines, going from the bottom of the Lotus, right down to edge of the paper. To make the large leaf, draw two side-ways "rainbow" lines on either sides of the lotus stalk. For its veins, draw what I call little "birds" along the inside of the leaf. Then imagine a centre for your leaf and draw lines extending from your "birds" to the centre. 

2) Contour your drawing with oil pastels, red for the Lotus, dark green for the stalk and stem, dark blue for water. Colour your lotus using medium pressure. I've made mine pink with red veins.

Tada! and we are done, the Lotus is a beautiful flower to draw anytime of the year, not just come Independence Day. 😊🇮🇳🕊️

Here are some Lotuses by our little artists, I have finally embraced online classes, I kept putting it off till recently, but now I look forward to our virtual art room. 😊

Follow me on Instagram, @brushes_and_crayons_ I post almost daily and share stories from our online art classes and lessons. Share your art-work with the #brushesandcrayons

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Have a great weekend, stay safe and see you in another post.

~ Sabrina.