Medium: Oil Pastels and white acrylic Paint on Mixed-Media paper

Who doesn’t like a Monarch Butterfly? So many of the kindergarteners and first graders must have learned about them in their classroom while observing the life cycle and ultimately seen them hatching out of their cocoons! Well, I am not here right now for giving a science lesson, but I remember my kids used to love those National Geographic books about animals when they were little, and look what I found…an online link to it! So, why not read about it with your kids and have fun drawing them too!!

https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/animals/invertebrates/facts/monarch-butterfly

Let’s start with the materials required for the drawing:

1. Mixed-media paper or any white paper that you have
2. A well-sharpened pencil and eraser.
3. A thick card-stock paper or watercolor paper to create a stencil.
4. Scissors
5. Oil Pastels
6. White acrylic paint and a thin brush or an Acrylic Paint pen
7. Painter’s tape

Step-by-step Process

1. Making the stencil- We want the left and right sides of the butterfly wings to be symmetrical, so we are going to make a stencil of butterfly wings. If your drawing paper is 9×12, make sure your cardstock is at least 5×7. When we draw the wings on the card stock make sure to utilize maximum space, in other words, draw big. Cut it out to create your stencil.

2. Place your stencil on the paper towards the left and draw the left side of the wing, next turn it to the right side to draw the right side of the wings as shown in the picture. You could stick your stencil on the paper with masking tape before drawing so that it stays in place.

Next, draw the rest of the body and the antennae.

4. Now it’s time to add the patterns on the butterfly wings to create a Monarch.

5. Color the inside of the butterfly with a yellow-orange oil Pastel. Next thickly outline the patterns and the outer edges with a black Oil Pastel.

6. Finally, add details on the corners with white Acrylic paint pens OR acrylic paint and the back of a thin paintbrush.

If you would like to watch the step-by-step video follow the YouTube Video. Have Fun!!

In this lesson, we will learn to make a Color wheel with Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary colors. We will also learn about the Complementary and analogous Color groups as they play an important role in deciding your art composition.

Let’s first start by understanding Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary colors. We will use three colors from our color pencil set to understand our terms-Red, Yellow, and Blue. First, to create a color wheel template we will divide a circle into 12 parts( 12 triangles).

Primary Colors- Primary colors are the most important in a painter’s palette because these are hues that cannot be created or derived by mixing other colors. The Primary colors in a color wheel are Red, Yellow, and Blue. If you have these three colors you can mix them in different amounts to create different colors.

Secondary Colors-Secondary Colors are colors that can be created by mixing equal amounts of two Primary colors. Red+Yellow=ORANGE, Yellow+Blue=GREEN, and Blue+Red=PURPLE are the three Secondary Colors on the Color wheel.

Tertiary Colors-Tertiary colors are created by mixing equal amounts of Primary color with a secondary color. Red+Orange=RED-ORANGE, Blue+Orange=BLUE-ORANGE, Blue+Green =BLUE-GREEN, Yellow+Green=YELLOW-GREEN, Yellow+Orange=YELLOW-ORANGE, and Red+Purple=RED-PURPLE are the six Tertiary colors.

Next, let’s talk about Complementary and Analogous colors.

Complementary colors are colors that are on opposite sides of the color wheel.

Analogous colors are a set of three colors that are next to each other on the color wheel usually a primary color and a secondary and tertiary color that sits right next to it.

Complementary color schemes create a highly contrasting composition, whereas analogous color scheme creates a composition with low contrast.

Color temperature is also another aspect where simply by looking at the colors we have a sense of warmth or cold. For example, when you look at the colors Red, Orange or Yellow you sense the hot sun, making these warm colors. Similarly, when you look at blue or green you might have a feeling of a cool sea breeze or cool grass which makes these Cool Colors. So when you have different hues, the hue which has more of the warm colors mixed will feel warmer and vice-versa. So a hue of violet or purple will feel more toward the warm spectrum if it has more red, whereas if it has more blue in it it will feel cooler.

Watch this video step-by-step to learn to make an easy color wheel using oil pastels

The colors being mixed with white, black, and grey also create different Hues, tints, shades, and saturation. To learn more about this, please refer to the previous post-https://nishasartforkids.com/2022/11/04/what-is-color-lesson-1-in-color-element-of-art/

In this lesson, we will draw 12 things using Prismacolor colored pencils for beginners/kids. These are things that we would use a lot for our drawings, and these techniques will help us add form and texture to make our drawings look realistic.

The 12 things that we are going to learn to draw in this lesson are:

1. Mountains/Hills
2. Smoke
3. Grass
4. Wood/ Log
5. Water in a lake
6. Waterfall
7. Rocks
8. Circle to sphere
9. Brick Wall
10. Shadows/Reflections
11. Feather Texture
12. Fur Texture

We will use the techniques we learned in our previous lesson( https://nishasartforkids.com/2022/11/10/colored-pencils-techniques-for-beginners-lesson-1/)

to color along the form of the object, applying different amounts of pressure while coloring.

Please follow the link for the step-by-step video lesson to create each of these different objects:

In the last two posts on Form, we learned to create dimensions on simple and geometric shapes. In this lesson, we will try adding a form to a more organic shape.

The first step to drawing anything is to identify the shape of the object and try to replicate it on paper either using contour drawing or by combining simple shapes together. Once we have the outline, the next step would be to create a form so that the object doesn’t look flat. Think of yourself as a sculptor creating an object and how his hands would be moving to create the shape. Your pencil will move in that direction and do the same thing for you on your drawing surface.

In this exercise, we will draw a snail and then we will give it a 3- dimensional form. We will use contour and cross-contour lines, we will add shades and highlight, and add texture to do so.

Please look at the photograph below of a snail and observe how the lines move. Observation is the key to create a sucessful form. You can also follow step-step video linked below.

When we start drawing we will do a basic contour drawing first. Then we begin by adding cross- contour lines, add a horizon line, then add shadows and highlights using hatched and cross-hatched lines and start seeing the transformation from a flat object to an organic form. Observe the difference between figure 1 and 2 below

FOLLOW THE STEPS BELOW OR WATCH THE VIDEO ON YOUTUBE TO DRAW:

Please watch below for video lesson, don’t forget to subscribe to the channel!

In this lesson, we will learn about contour and cross-contour lines, and how they can be used to create form and depth in our drawing. We will first try to understand the meaning of contour and cross contour lines before doing our exercise.

Contour Lines- Contour line is the outline of a drawing without any shading or details. Practicing to draw your object using contour lines is important as it greatly improves your hand-eye coordination because your eye needs to focus on the object whereas your hand needs to draw it on the paper at the same time.

Cross-contour lines- cross- Contour lines are lines that moves across the object that we are drawing. It is the direction that our eye moves when you look at an object. Cross- contour lines helps create an illusion of  dimension and form to an object.

In this exercise we will give form to various flat 2 dimensional objects. We will do that by creating contour drawings of objects and then we we draw cros-contour lines across to create form.

Start by drawing outlines of various objects as show in the image below:

In the next step try to visualize how the objects look in reality and in which direction the eyes move when you look at them. Now try drawing lines along your visualization. The drawings would look some what like the image below:

You can see how the circle looks like a ball, the oval takes the shape of an egg and so on. You have successfully added form to your objects!