Giant Ink Drawings {Art Lab for Kids} -

Giant Ink Drawings – Practice

Art Lab 2 was on Giant Ink Drawings. The girls had never drawn with ink and brushes before. So, I set them up a simple still life for them to practice. They used their sketch pads for this. Here is the still life:

I encouraged the girls to really study the still life before attempting to draw it. Together, we found the ellipses, we talked about perspective and the importance of filling the page. They drew it first in pen:

And then in ink:

Here you can see Abigail’s pen drawing and Becca’s ink drawing:

We didn’t add any colour yet. This activity was to familiarise the girls with the new medium of brush and ink.

Giant Ink Paintings – Picture Study

Next, we did a picture study on one of Susan Schwake’s Giant Ink Drawings. I wrote a post about it last week, but basically I set up a still life as similar to Schwake’s as I could. The girls tried to create an ink and watercolour drawing as similar in style to Schwake’s as possible:

The goal of this activity was for the girls to study and replicate how ink and watercolour can be used together for great effect. We were all very pleased by the results:

This set the girls up well for their own still life ink drawings.

Giant Ink Drawings – Making Our Own

The last part of the lesson was to create our own still life and do an ink and watercolour based on that. I set it up:

I made it fairly simple with lots of interesting colours. We spent a long time discussing the still life. My goal of these lessons is to teach the girls to observe, and to draw what they see.

This is harder than it sounds. For most of their lives they have been drawing what they think they see. By this, I mean that they draw a flower like the generic flower in their head, rather than the flower in front of them. Even now, that is their default position:

Both girls drew the flower as they thought it should look rather than how they actually looked. This obviously still needs work 🙂

I love how they are becoming great at the layering of paint to create volume and structure. They now naturally begin with the lighter colours and leave to dry before adding darker ones: