We've stepped away from the fast sketches for the time being but we've discovered that a lot of the students quite enjoy pre-painted papers and then make the drawing around it. This started as an accident when a student was using one piece of paper to sort out their color choices and it kind of ended up being a nice little rainbow type effect. Later, the student drew something over it and it turned out really nice. I would say that it was more creative than painting after the fact because a lot of time we tend to turn things like this almost into one of the paint-by-number books that existed when I was a kid - maybe they still do exist.
The idea here is that you paint a background with no idea as to what you are actually going to put on top of it. Although not required, I did encourage people to be honest about having no idea what they were going to draw over the paint and if they didn't trust themselves to work as a team and have a partner do the painting for you and then you draw over it. Some of the students didn't like this idea because then when it is finished it isn't their own piece of art, it is a co-op. I can understand that so I left it up to them how they wanted to handle it.
Afterwards the students were permitted to add any details that they want and in the above one those details were some plants. Most of the students decided to do some sort of building and I'm cool with that. Others did things that were a little more abstract and some of them made things that didn't resemble anything at all. It's all art anyway so we just let people do whatever they want. As kids tend to do though they ended up emulating what others in the class were doing and a couple of them were actually trying to see how close they could make theirs look alike. There are no rules in art, so nothing is really required. I just provide a guideline and any assistance that they want, the rest of the details are left entirely up to them.
The end results are a lot of fun and I am seriously impressed with the creative vision of a lot of these kids considering that most of them are under 10 years of age.
There are no limits or rules in art and decided to draw around a pre-selected random color scheme can be a fun way to get the creative juices flowing. Give it a try some day. You might end up surprising youself!
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