Art Class for Kids & Beginners: Drawing and Watercolor Painting Big Sunflowers in a Vase

1. Introduction and Supplies You Will Need: I Hi, friends. How are you? I hope you're having a great day 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 so they will feel successful. Today, we are going to be creating sunflowers in a vase. A 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. I like to use this size paintbrush, but just use what you have available to you. You will need a cup or a bowl with clean water. You will need a black crayon or a black oil pastel. Either one will work, and you will need a paper towel. So 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 Big Sunflowers Design: In this step, we are going to draw our sunflower design. So let's get started. The first thing that we're going to do is we're going to pick up our black oil pastel or our black crayon. We're going to find the middle of our piece of paper. The middle of my piece of paper is right here. And right up here, right above the middle of our piece of paper on the left hand side, we're going to make a circle about this big. So it's not going to be a giant circle that takes up the whole entire space on your paper, but it will be about this big. We're not going to be making tiny circles today or even small ones. We want this circle to be big. Alright? So what I'm going to do is make a circle around like this. Oh, my oil pastel just broke. So I'm going to put that part right there. That happens quite a bit with oil pastels. They're super soft and they're made out of oil. So they do break. So you just say, Oh, oh, oh, well, that happens sometimes. And you put the broken part on the side of your piece of paper, and then you continue on. Alright, so now we have our first circle. Now we're going to make another circle next to it right here on the right. So I'm going to make mine about the same size, but it's going to be a little bit lower. Keep in mind, your circle might not look exactly like my circle, and that's okay. We want your circle to look like your circle. Sound good? Alright, now we're going to make one more sunflower, and it's going to be right here. So we're going to create a circle right here about the same size as the other two, and going to make it pretty close to those other two without touching. Now we have our three sunflowers. And what we're going to do next is we are going to add some petals to our sunflowers. So sunflower petals, they can be different shapes, some are pointy, some are more round. You get to decide the type of petal that you'd like to make. And we're going to go all the way around our circles. If you bump into another circle, that's okay. Just keep going. Just bump into the circle and keep going. So there we go. Alright, now I'm going to do the same thing with the next circle. All right. So I have my three circles here, and the petals have bumped into each other, but that's okay. That's just fine. Now we're going to add a few little details onto the inside of our circles. We're going to add some little seeds. So add some little dots, some little seeds. You don't need to add 1 million seeds, but maybe about ten or 12 seeds. Spread all out. There we go. Now we have our sunflowers. And what we're going to do is we are going to draw some leaves for sunflowers. So I'm going to make some nice big leaves. We'll make one here, and I see a space here. And then I see a space down here as well. So anywhere that you feel could use a leaf, go ahead and put a leaf there. Be one over here as well. Alright. Now we have our sunflowers. We have our leaves. And what we can do next is we can add a little bit of detail to our leaves. So if you'd like to add a little line for the ing, you can go ahead and do that. Now we're going to move down to the bottom of our sheet of paper, and we're going to make a small vase. So we're going to just make a slanted line, not touching the bottom of our piece of paper, another slanted line, and then we're going to close up at the bottom. Now we are going to move to the very bottom of our piece of paper, and we're going to make a table for our vase of flowers to sit on. So I'm just going to make a slightly curved line, jump over my vase, and then another line that comes out that's slightly curved, as well. So there we go. We have our flowers with our leaves. We have our vase, and then we have our table down here at the bottom. If there's anything else that you'd like to add to your drawing, go ahead and do that at this time. For example, I think I might add some small circles. Inside of this base because I think it will jazz it up a little. It'll make it a little bit more interesting. So I'm going to add some small circles. If there's anything that you'd like to add, you don't have to add circles. You can add anything that you'd like. You can even add something to the table down here if you'd like. It's completely up to you. Maybe I'll add one more circle up here. There we go. Alright, I think I'm finished. I really like the way that my design looks. So when we come back, we will be painting our design. 3. Step 2: Paint the Design: In this step, we are going to paint our design. So let's get started. The first thing that we're going to do is we are going to add a drop or two of water into each of our pans of paint. And what that will do is it will soften up our paint a little bit, so it is easier for us to use. So I really encourage students to take that step because it really does help. Alright, now that our paints are softening up, let's turn our attention to our design. So here we have a little vase full of sunflowers, really big sunflowers. And what we're going to do is we're going to focus on using the fall colors for this project. So for the flowers themselves, we're going to use maybe some brown and some yellow for the petals. Some green for the leaves and for the background, you get to decide. For the vase, you get to decide in any type of design that you have inside of your vase or on your table, you get to decide which colors that you use, as well. If you want to use a little bit of color that's not considered a fall color, then you can go ahead and do that. You get to choose the table color as well. So let's go over those fall colors again, so that would be red. Orange, yellow, green, and brown. Okay. And then if you'd like to add a little bit of another color, that would be fine. So I'm going to start with the lightest color, which in this particular drawing would be yellow. So I'm going to paint my petals for my sunflowers yellow. I might add a little bit of orange into there and some of the petals at some point. But for now, I'm just going to be painting these petals yellow. What I'm going to do is I'm going to focus on just the actual design, and I'm going to apply paint to the design, meaning the sunflowers and the vase and the leaves, but not the table or the background. So I'm just going to focus on this part for this particular step, okay? I'm going to speed up the video so you can watch me paint. Alrighty friends, I'm finished painting my design. I have the sunflowers, the leaves, and the vase painted. As you can see, I use two different shades of green for the leaves. I thought that that would look nice. And then I used a really, really light brown to paint the center of the sunflowers. The way that I made the light brown is I added a lot of water into one of my pans of paint. And I added just a little bit of paint, and so it made this really light brown. So if you want a lighter color, you add more water. If you want a darker color, then you add more paint. In the next step, we are going to be painting the background. So I will see you back here in the next video. 4. Step 3: Paint the Background: In this step, we are going to paint the background. So let's get started. I'm going to paint my table a light brown, and then I think I'm going to paint my background probably orange because I want to stick with those fall colors. So you get to use the colors, paints that you like, but those are the colors that I'm going to use. So let me show you how I go ahead and paint my background. Alrighty friends, I'm finished painting the background. I really like the way that my artwork turned out. I hope that you had a lot of fun with this project. I will see you next time.