Tuesday, January 12, 2016

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...

17 comments:

  1. Art + books = great times for all. What an awesome project. Sometimes I wish that adult art classes used that kind of prompt, but people seem to think only kids like them. (False!)

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    1. You are SO right, P! I would LOVE a 'Sense and Sensibility' themed art class to attend myself. Wouldn't it be dreamy, hearing passages from the book read to you, then watercolouring the landscape it takes place in??

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  2. They did an awesome job! I love all the different layers!

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    1. Love that you noticed the layers, Edi! I thought the students outdid themselves.

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  3. You always come up with great ideas for your classes! The kids did well :)

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  4. Cool Kraken and what a fun art project :)

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    1. I'm just glad the kraken didn't seem to scare any of them!

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  5. Oh, very nice. Creative kids and, I think, a good teacher!

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  6. That is gorgeous! I don't have patience to teach kids if I'm honest but I do LOVE to see what they make and their thoughts on the world, the potential is beautiful. Art class was my sacred place as a kid, it's a beautiful thing that you're giving kids the same gift every year. :)

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    1. Great feedback, V. I'm glad to hear that art time was impactful for you as a kid. I think it is a great outlet for ALL aptitudes :)

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  7. how cool and creative! great idea and lovely art work!

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    1. I thought the theme appealed to some of my older students. It's a fun challenge to write programming for twelve year old boys and their chums!

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  8. Great idea for finding inspiration, I'm going to have to check out that poem. You have some very talented students.

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