Beware the Kraken!

When the skies are grey and the nights long here in the Pacific Northwest, I often gravitate to the melancholy for inspiration when coming up with themes for art classes.

My English undergraduate degree provides limitless fodder for the melancholic; Alfred Lord Tennyson's The Kraken is one of my favorite examples of this mood.

I read this short poem for my class of intermediate elementary school students, lingering for not very long on the words 'abysmal' , 'shadowy', 'sickly' and...eeeeep!... 'die'!    Rather, I hoped for 'deep', 'enormous', 'slumbering green' to colour the imaginations of these student artists before me.

The plan was multi-faceted: I was going to teach them watercolour grading principles, incorporating minor collage and printmaking techniques also.

Here are the results!

The children did a graded sky, and a wet-on-wet watercolour technique in the sea.

Once the watercolour was more or less dry, we painted the Kraken with a light grey acrylic that I custom blended.  Also, we added colour to the ships (we'd drawn in pencil at the start) with a limited palette of pencil crayons.

A marker cap dipped in some white acrylic paint was our printmaking tool to make bubbles in the ocean.

With paint brushes and white glue, we collaged just a few strips of pastel tissue paper to the ocean, for some interest and texture.

A high gloss acrylic medium washed over the entire image once everything was dry.

Some students decided to go over some of the illustration lines with sharp graphite pencils at the very end.

These works were, happily, very well received by the parents of the students and satisfied my romantic/ melancholic soul this winter...