Adding reflections to any art makes it look more realistic by adding more dimension to your art.

In this post I will show you an easy way to add reflections to your drawing!

We start the lesson by explaining how the reflection of a vertical object on a flat reflecting surface would be almost the same size as the original object and so when you see your reflection on a water source like a stream or river it appears to be an upside down version of you!

We will use this understanding on a piece of paper by folding the paper into exactly half and then we use the upper half to make the original image and the lower half will be the reflection( on water) of the upper half.

We made 2 Oil Pastel paintings :

1. Fall trees on a Lake
2. A cityscape at night time

The things we need for this project are:

1. An art Paper or a printer paper .
2. Some Oil Pastels to draw the image
3. A popsicle stick or palette knife or any plastic knife( you may use your nails too 🙂 )
4. A light blue crayon( Optional)
5. Some White or silver Acrylic paint with a thin brush Or Acrylic Marker pens to add some additional details (Optional)

STEP-BY_STEP INSTRUCTIONS

Below is a step-by-step instruction with pictures for doing a night time cityscape with reflections on the river!

• Fold your drawing paper into a half, now hold your paper so that the folding line is horizontal. The top half is your object that you need to draw and the bottom half is your reflection.

• On the top half, use oil pastels to draw and color your picture.

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• Now fold and close your picture.
• Now rub the white part using a palette knife or a popsicle stick; use your energy so that the paint on top part gets transferred to the bottom half of the page.

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• Now open up your drawing to make sure that the paint transferred evenly, if not repeat Step 3 and 4 again.
• OPTIONAL STEP: Now using your light blue crayon to add some color to the left over areas( if any) at the bottom half of paper( to make it look like water).

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• OPTIONAL STEP: For the night sky, you may use some acrylics or Acrylic marker to add some shooting stars on the sky!

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Not a big reader? Watch the quick Video:

Check out the student artwork at our Thursday group reflections lesson!

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In this lesson, we will learn how to draw faces with different expressions or Emotions. For each emotion, we will draw an emoji and a more realistic human face.

We will draw basic human emotions: Happiness, Sadness, Surprise, Scared, Anger,Disgust

The facial features that we need to consider while drawing each emotion:

1. Eyebrows
2. Eyes
3. Nose
4. Mouth

We need to draw each of these features a little differently for each expression.We will start by trying to express each emotion on an emoji face. Let’s see how!

Happiness

Large eyes, arched eyebrows and lips up

Sadness

Eyes down, eyebrows in inverse curve, lips or mouth down

Surprise

Eyebrows raised up in a curve, eyes wide open and mouth open in circle

Anger

Eyebrows like an upside down V, eyes open wide( or alternatively make them squinted), lips narrow and to the side

Scared

This looks like a mix of sadness and surprise, with eyebrows upside down, mouth corners down like an arc and wide eyes.

Disgust

Narrow squinted eyes, eyebrows lowered sideways,Mouth down in a frown or a “blehh” expression

Once we figure out how to express each emotion using emoji face, we will draw each of these expressions on a human face concentrating on each of the features.

Below is the facial expressions corresponding to the emojis; use the emojis as a guideline to draw the actual human face!

Large eyes, arched eyebrows and lips up -HAPPY

Eyes down, eyebrows in inverse curve, lips or mouth down– SAD

Eyebrows raised up in a curve, eyes wide open and mouth open in circle–SURPRISE!

Eyebrows like an upside down V, eyes open wide( or alternatively make them squinted), lips narrow and to the side -ANGER

Narrow squinted eyes, eyebrows lowered sideways,Mouth down in a frown or a “blehh” expression-DISGUST

This looks like a mix of sadness and surprise, with eyebrows upside down, mouth corners down like an arc and wide eyes.-SCARED

Below is a slideshow of the artwork done in class by the students, some of them have colored the human faces and to add some exaggeration they have added some colors to the face based on the expression which is a fun Art way to express the feelings !!