Art Class for Kids & Beginners: Drawing & Watercolor Painting Ladybugs in the Garden

1. Introduction and Supplies You Will Need: 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. Today, we are going to create this Lady Bug garden. 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 paintbrush. I'm going to use this smaller size paint brush because I have smaller spaces. But if you'd like to use a larger paint brush, you can go ahead and do that. Just use what you have available to you. You will need a cop or bowl with clean water and a black oil pastel or crayon and 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 a Garden Ladybug Design: In this step, we are going to draw our design, let's get started. Go ahead and pick up your black on or oil pastel. What we're going to do is we are just going to add some bugs to our piece of paper. You can choose to add as many as you like. I'm going to show you how I bug. I'm going to start about right here and make an oval. And then attached to that oval, I'm going to make a curve line like this. Then I'm going to make two small lines coming out the top. Now I'm going to make a line coming down the metal and I'm going to make some spots. When I make a spot on one side of the line, I will make another spot at the same point on the other side. I have a spot spot there and a spot here. You can make as many spots as you'd like. Then we're just going to add some legs. There we go. All right. And then this point right here at the head of the lady bug, we will paint in a little bit later. I'm going to make another lady bug here. I make a circle. I make the head with a curve line two lines, some dots at the end. Going to make a line down the middle and some spots. Then some legs coming out the side. All right. I think I'm going to make another one here. This one's a little bit smaller. Almost forgot the feet. Now, I'm going to make a little bit of a bigger vy gray here. Make the head. I think this lady bug needs some more spots because she's big. All right. I think I'm going to make my last lady bug right here. If you cannot fit five lady bugs on your piece of paper. That's okay. Just put as many lady bugs as you'd like on your piece of paper. All right, now take a look at your piece of paper. If there are any more lady bugs that you'd like to add, you can go ahead and do that now. What we're going to do next is we are going to fill in the space around the lady bugs with some things that we think of when we think about the spring season. Okay. So when I think about the spring season, I think about plants. I think about flowers specifically. So I think that I am going to make some flowers, and my favorite type of flower to make is a daisy. So I'm just going to start filling in some of my spaces with some daisies. The way that I like to make a daisy is to make a circle in the center and then just add some more curved lines for the petals. I'm going to take a moment to add some daisies to my sheet of paper. All right, friends, I have my ladybugs and I have my daisies. I wanted to show you something. If you have a pretty big space but not a big enough space for a flower or a ladybug, you can make a half of a flower like this. You make a semicircle, and then you just add some petals onto that semicircle, and it looks like the flowers going off the piece of paper. Now, what we're going to do is we are going to add some leaves to our flowers. All right, friends, I'm finished adding my leaves to my design. As you can see, they are different shapes and sizes, and that's the look that I wanted. All right, friends, now that we have our lady bugs and our flowers and our leaves. We're going to fill up the rest of our spaces. For example, I have this space and this space down here and a space over here. I am going to actually put some circles in those spaces to fill up those spaces a little bit. You can choose any shape that you'd like to fill in those additional spaces. I'm just going to go ahead and start adding circles just to fill up those spaces. Okay. All right, friends, go ahead and take a look at your artwork. If there's anything else that you'd like to add, go ahead and do that now. And then what we're going to do is in the next step, we are going to start painting our design. Okay. 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 I would suggest that you do is to place one or two drops of water into each of your pans of paint. What this will do is it will soften up your paint a bit so that it is easier for you to use. So I do suggest that you take that step because it really does help. Now that our paints are softening up, let's turn our attention to our design. So what we're going to do is we are going to paint everything that we have drawn. For example, we're going to paint our lady bugs, our flowers, our leaves, and our dots. You can choose the colors that you'd like to paint all of those different things, okay? We are not going to be painting the background. That's the space around all of the things that you have drawn. All right. So we're going to leave that white, but we are going to start by painting our ladybugs. And you can either use a larger paint brush for this step or if you have a smaller paint brush, you can use a smaller paintbrush. I just put these two paint brushes in here because sometimes I like to switch off, but just use what you have. I'm going to start by painting my ladybugs red. Notice how I'm trying to stay inside those lines. But if I go outside of the lines a little bit, that's okay. No problem. Don't worry about that too much. All right. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to paint the bugs. And then I am going to move on and I'm going to paint my flowers and my leaves and my circles, all kinds of different colors. I haven't even decided which colors to paint them. What I'm going to do about the lady Bug's head, which is going to be a really light black color. I'm going to paint that last so that our water does not get all muddy. Remember, If you'd like a lighter, softer shade of color, you use more water and less. Then if you want a vibrant bold color, then you will use more paint and less water. I'm going to go ahead and speed up this video. You can watch me and then you can get started on your own artwork. All right, friends, I'm finished painting the ladybugs bodies and the flowers and the leaves and the circles. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to paint the heads of the ladybugs and I'd like to paint those black. I'm going to take some water, put it into one of my wells, and then add just a tiny bit of black paint. The black paint is a very strong color, we want to make sure that we don't go too dark. I want more of a grayish black. It's very powerful. That's perfect. All right, friends, I'm finished painting the heads of the Lady Bug, and I'm finished with my art project. I hope that you had a lot of fun with this project. I had a lot of fun teaching you. I will see you next time.