We've been having some fun in my classes with painting things in a "trippy" way and it all began with one student making a mistake that turned out to be pretty fantastic looking. It was a car and he slipped up with the painting and just threw color all over the place with zero regards to the lines. This was intriguing and although I don't call out individual class members the rest of the class thought it was one of the best things we have seen yet this session.
Therefore we all decided as a group that we would do some trippy paintings as a group and to enforce this we started with the coloring and then drew the design around it. We ended up with some pretty fantastic results and a lot of smiling faces in the classroom.
Most students opted to do a building of some sort because it is one of the easier things to do. Normally we would start with a pencil outline, then fill in the wanted lines with felt-tip pen, then carefully paint inside the lines as much as possible. This time we made a swirl of whatever colors the students wanted and then made the drawing inside of it. I thought it was fun and so did the kids.
We had to wait a little while for the paint to dry because pencil doesn't like to play with water all that well and the paper also can become quite easy to tear when it is wet. We did use higher than normal quality paper to try to prevent this but there were some tears. No worries! This just made those particular pieces have an even more unique look.
At the end we did some additional optional shadowing - which is something I always encourage since it is a big part of making images look 3 dimensional and I was quite happy with the results as were the kids. We will have to move on to other things but I believe most of the students actually kind of prefer to do it this way. This method also encourages people to get their creative juices flowing because you need to have a pretty decent idea of what the shape of what you are doing is going to be before you ever put paint on paper.
Try it some day if you are a water-coloring fan. It takes very little time and was very rewarding!
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