Seascapes-Two Ways!

We created these beautiful seascapes using two different types of methods and media.

First, we took a "trip" to a beautiful island paradise, seen here. 

Then, we created our own picture postcards to send home. (You can see some of them below.)



To create these lovely sunsets, we first filled in our backgrounds with plenty of soft pastels, starting at the top. Then at the horizon line near the center of the paper, we repeated our colors in reverse order. We left plenty of pastel powder on the paper and we didn't rub the pastel until...



we dipped our fingers in white tempera paint and finger-painted over the pastels, using long, horizontal strokes. The results were these lovely pastel colors for our beach scene!

While it dried. we created a few practice images on a plain piece of paper, such as distant islands and palm trees, in thick black paint.



Then we carefully painted our final images over our dried background colors to create silhouettes of palm trees, grasses, islands in the background and birds flying overhead.

We had a little time left, so we also made these textured post cards to send home! We used postcard size wood planks and modeling clay. Yup! This is the same oil-based plasticine clay we used to play with in the 60's! 

The clay comes in a huge assortment of colors and is so easy to spread and blend colors with your fingers. Or you can roll thin ropes or balls and squash them down onto your board to create an elaborate picture.

Kids love to learn to use new media and new techniques. Or old media and new techniques, as the case may be. They all wanted to make more of these at home. Added bonus: modeling clay is cheap and you can find it at Walmart!