Form I Brush Drawing: Watercolor Flat and Graded Washes and Mozart Composer Study

My oldest started her watercolor lessons with her brothers today. She is getting the lessons from Amanda at Hearts and Trees . These are simple lessons that only take a few minutes but they help teach better control of the paints & paintbrush. In the first part of the lesson, she taught them how to make a good clean stripe of color by loading the brush with watercolor paint before applying it to the paper. She asked them to make stripe after stripe, overlapping to make a rectangle. Then she showed them how to make a graded wash by dipping the brush in water between each stripe, making the paint fade with each application

Watercolor Technique #1: Flat and Graded Washes

Materials:

Watercolor Paper

Watercolors

Assorted Brushes

Cups of Water

Flat Wash

Dip your brush in water and then load it up with watercolor paint.

Paint a stripe of color across the top of your paper.

Without dipping your brush in water again, load the brush up with more paint.

Paint another stripe, overlapping with the last stripe.

Repeat until you have a large block of color.

Graded Wash

Dip your brush in water and then load it up with watercolor paint.

Paint a stripe of color across the top of your paper.

Dip your brush in water (do not swish).

Paint another stripe, overlapping with the last stripe. The stripes should be fading in color as they continue down the page.

Repeat until you have no more paint left in the brush.

Then I began our composer study with Amadeus Mozart. They learned about his childhood by listening to 15 minutes of The Story of Mozart in Words and Music, which is a great CD which blends a narration of Mozart's life story with selections of his music. They were allowed to draw as they wished as it was playing and I asked a sentence narration from them on what they had learned after the selections was finished.