Art Class for Kids and Beginners: Draw & Watercolor Paint a Lantern to Celebrate Chinese New Year

1. Introduction and Supplies You Will Need: Hi friends, how are you? I hope you're having a great today. I'm excited about sharing this project with you. This is a drawing and watercolor painting project that I designed especially for kids. Students do not need to have any drawing or painting experience at all to be successful with this project. I will guide students step by step through all the steps that they need to take. Today, we are going to be creating this Chinese New Year lantern. I hope that you have a lot of fun with this project. Let's get started. Let's talk about the supplies and the materials that you will need for this project. The first thing that you'll need is a sheet of watercolor paper. You will need a set of watercolor paints and a paint brush. You will need a cup able with clean water and a pencil with an eraser. You will need a black oil pastel, or a black crayon and a yellow oil pastel, or a yellow crayon and a paper towel and a circle template. Go ahead and gather all of those supplies and materials, and I'll see you back here in the next video. 2. Step 1: Draw a Lantern Design: In this step, we're going to draw our lantern design. Let's get started. Go ahead and pick up your template and place it on your piece of paper. Right here, we have equal distance between our template and the edge of our sheet of paper on both sides. Then we're going to have a little bit less space here at the top than we do down here at the bottom. All right. Your template size might be a little bit different from mine and that's okay. Go ahead and take your pencil and what we're going to do is we're going to trace around this template. The easiest thing that you can do to be successful with this is you can make sure that your pencil is held vertically. That means straight up and down. Then you're going to push just a little bit against your template while holding your template with your other hand. Your non writing hand goes slowly and carefully. What I'm going to have to do now is I'm going to have to move my hand a little bit because it was in the way. Make sure you're holding that template down firmly because it might want to slip around. Make sure you go all the way around your template. There we go. I think I'm finished. Let's see. Let me pick up my template. There we go. Nice round circle, right? For the rest of the project, we're not going to use the pencil, we're going to use our oil pastels or crayons. We're going to start out with our black crayon, and what we're going to do is we're going to draw the outline of our design with our black crayon. And then fill in a little bit with the yellow. Okay, here we go. I'm going to start here and I'm going to outline this pencil line with my black oil pastel. If you have a crayon, that's okay. Just do your best. It's okay if it's not perfect, just do your best. Now what we're going to do is come up to the top of our circle and we're going to make a really long oval like this that is attached to the top of the circle. We're going to make a smaller oval on top of that. Then we're going to make two straight lines that are pretty close to each other. Coming out of the top, that's going to be the string that's holding our lantern. Now what we're going to do is we're going to come straight down. And in the middle what we're going to do is we're going to create a shape that looks like this. It's a line curve around, go straight curve back up, and then touch this initial first circle line. Then we're going to make another one of those shapes, but it's going to be just a little bit smaller right now down here, we're going to create some little beads. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to make a circle. If you'd like to create a different shape of a bead, you can go ahead and do that. A circle, maybe a smaller circle, then maybe a little bit of a bigger circle. Then coming out from this circle on the bottom. I'm just going to make some lines coming out like this, some fringe. Now I'm going to attach these circles to each other with a string. Come down like this. All right. What we're going to do now is we're going to pick up our yellow oil pastel or crayon and we're going to add some details. All right. The first detail that we're going to make is inside of this main part of the lantern. We're going to start with a straight line coming from the very top, in the middle of the lantern to the very bottom of the lantern, right in the middle. We're going to make a straight line. Then we're going to make two more lines. We're going to start here at the top. Then we're going to make a curve line. And we're going to end that curve line about right here, not touching this initial yellow line. But let me show you what I mean. We're going to go about halfway between this line and this line end up about right here. As you can see, I'm not touching that line, but I'm getting pretty close. Then I'm going to do the same thing on the other side. Now that we have some designs on our lantern, what we're going to do is we are going to create some background designs. And I'm going to show you some really neat ways to make some stars that can go around our lantern. Some lights or some stars you can call them. Either. What I do is I make a T across like this, then coming through this middle connection point, I'm going to make more lines like this. And I'm pushing pretty hard. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to make smaller lines coming out this way between each of those spaces. Base, huh? I'm going to make another one over here, make a cross or a T first, then I'm going to that other cross going the other way. Going between those initial lines. Then I'm going to make these smaller lines right here. Notice that this little beam of light is a little bit smaller than the other one. Now I'm going to make two more of these star lights, one here and one here. Let me go ahead and do that. There we go. Now if there's anything else that you would like to add onto your design at this point, go ahead and do that. In the next step, what we're going to do is we are going to start painting our lantern design. 3. Step 2: Paint the Lantern: In this step, we are going to apply some watercolor paints to our design. Let's get started. Let's put a couple of drops into our red, our orange, and our yellow. The reason why we do that is because we want these three colors to soften up a little bit because these are the colors that we're going to use on our design. All right, now that our paints are softening up, let's talk about the colors for our design. We are going to be painting our actual lantern. This part, we're going to paint that red. Then we're going to be painting these areas yellow. Then these areas down here, these little beads, you can paint those any color that you'd like within that color palette. You can paint them red or orange or yellow. It's up to you. We're not going to be painting the background in this step. We will do that in the next step. Okay, I'm going to start with my yellow because it is the lightest color. I'm going to start up here, I want my yellow to be pretty dark, pretty saturated. I'm adding just a little bit of water and quite a bit of paint. I'm going to work down here now, add some yellow paint to these areas. Then I'm going to put a dot of paint into each of these beads, because I'm going to be painting those beads red. That's what I want to use for the color for the beads. Now I'm going to switch to the color red for my actual lantern. I'm going to push that paint around so I don't stay in one area. And as you can see, that yellow oil pastel is really resisting the paint. The color is popping out. All right, friends. So I've painted my lantern red, and I've painted these areas yellow. And then down here I added some yellow dots and added some red paint to the beads. As you can see, the red took over this bead right here. And that's okay. I'm just going to leave it as is. That's okay with me. The last thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to add a little bit of brown to this string coming down that's holding that lantern. And I want to make sure I just get a little bit of brown paint on there. Not much. There we go already. In the next step, what we're going to do is we are going to paint the background. 4. Step 3: Paint the Background: In this step, we are going to paint our background. Let's get started. The first thing that we're going to do is we are going to use the color yellow to create a little bit of a glow right around that lantern. We're going to use just a line of yellow. Then when we add our other color orange to the background, this will look like the lantern is glowing a little bit. Now that we have our line of yellow paint, what we're going to do is we're going to apply some orange paint to the background. And we're going to touch that yellow paint. And what's going to happen is that yellow paint and the orange paint are going to flow into each other. Okay? That's the look that we want. We want those two colors to blend just a little bit. I'm going to start here at the top of my piece of paper and I'm just going to work my way down. And I'm going to touch that yellow line and hope that the two colors blend together a little bit. All right, friends, I'm finished painting the background. As you can see, I went over my yellow stripe a little bit with the orange. You can still see that it's a little bit glowing from that yellow paint. But I wanted more of a blending color, so I decided to go over that with the orange. I hope that you had a lot of fun with this project. I will see you next time.