Barns! Barns! Barns!

This was another unit designed by Kathy Bareis that I got to teach during my student teaching experience. After building up brush control from our Chinese watercolor unit, we jumped into making barns. We talked about spatial perspective and how things get smaller the further they go back into the distance. The students' barns had to have two sides, be drawn as large as their hand, and have a side of their barn drawn at an angle. Then then added barn boards, nails, and shingles to their barns. Lastly, they had to draw at least three objects in front and three objects behind their barn. Then we taught them two watercolor techniques. The wet-on-wet technique was used to paint the sky and ground. Students needed to make observations of the colors they were using. If their sky looked stormy then their ground should reflect that. A darkish sky should have a darkish ground and vice versa. The other painting technique we showed them was graphic style. This technique uses a dry paper rather than a wet one. They used graphic style to paint everything else, such as animals, shingles, barn boards, etc. Shingles and barn boards were painted with three or four different colors so that they weren't all the same. Each shingle and barn board was also painted individually. Students were expected to have a light and DARK side (cue Darth Vader voice) on their barn. Lastly, we added layers to our painting by creating shadows that run away from the sun. Shadows were added to objects on the ground, under the roofline, under some shingles, and in door/window openings.