Chinese Watercolor Painting

We did a seven day long Chinese watercolor unit with the sixth graders. The major theme of the unit was to practice brush control for another upcoming unit that we will be doing. Throughout the project, students had the opportunity to paint their orchids with traditional bamboo brushes. We slowly built up the unit, first starting with two or three days of mixing various hues of green to paint leaf shapes. The students really needed to focus on making the leaves thin-to-thick-to-thin. This meant that they needed to be aware of the pressure that they were using on their brush. We then spent a couple days painting flowers and lightly using chalk to color the background. Lastly, they had two days to paint two final compositions. They were expected to use at least three hues of green and flowers that had similar colors and were made of two or three hues. The stems to the flowers needed to be thinner than the leaves and the background needed to be lightly chalked. Lastly, they matted their work on a piece of paper that they thought went well with their painting.

My example of the final project (minus being matted).

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My example of the final project (minus being matted).