Art for Kids and Beginners: How to Draw and Watercolor Paint a Folk Art Bird and Flowers

1. Introduction and Supplies You Will Need: Hi friends, how are you? I hope you're having a really great day today. I'd like to introduce you to this project. This is a drawing and watercolor painting project that I designed, especially for kids. You do not need to have any drawing or painting experience at all to be successful with this project. I will t2 all the steps that you need to take so you can feel comfortable at all times. Today we are going to be painting this folk art bird with some cute flowers. And the supplies in the materials that you will need are a piece of watercolor paper. You will need some watercolor paints and a paintbrush. I like to use a paintbrush about this size, but you can use whatever size you have available to you. You will need a cup or a bowl of clean water. You will need a black oil pastel or a black crayon. And you will need a paper towel just in case you have something that you need to clean up. So go ahead and gather those supplies and materials. And I'll see you back here in the next video. 2. Step 1: Draw a Folk Art Bird Design: In this step we are going to draw our folk art birds. So let's get started. The first thing that we're going to do is pick up either our black oil pastel or our black crayon. And we're going to make a backwards letter C on our piece of paper, a little bit to the right. So I'm going to make the letter C backwards. That is going to be the head of our bird. Now what we're going to do is we're going to make the body going up this way. So now I'm going to come back up to this part of our line and I'm going to come up with a curved line like this. And then down here at the bottom, I'm going to do the same with another curved line. Now, as you can see, I have one line going this way and one line going this way. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to now attach these two lines together with a v. That's going to be the tail of our bird. All right, So our bird is kind of heading down. And so we'll want to put His, be great here with a little dot in it. It's a triangle with a little dot. And then we'll want to make an eye so he can see where he's going. And then also what we'll need are some wings. So we're going to make wings right here coming off the top of his back. And to make our wings, what we're going to do is make a curve line coming out from this spot right here where the head and the body meet. And then we're going to have some little curved lines coming down like this. That's one of our wings. And then for other wing, we're going to come out. And then we're going to come down with those same little scalloped lines like this. Now we can add a few little designs in here if we'd like. So I think what I'll do is I'll add a line. And then I'll add another line right here. And then I think I'll add some circles here. Because in this type of folk art, there's a lot of pattern and shapes. You can add whatever patterns and shapes that you'd like that you think look good. Now I'd like to go to the body and the head of my bird. And I'd like to add some patterns and shapes into his body. So I think right here I'll add a curved line. And then I'll continue those curved lines all the way down his body. Alright, now I have my bird. And if you can think of any other designs that you'd like to add to your bird. Go ahead and do that. This is a bird in flight, so we're not going to be making his legs. His legs are going to be tucked up underneath his body. What we're going to do now is we're going to add some flowers around our bird. Wherever we see space, where we think a flower would look great. So I think a flower would look good right here. You can make whatever kind of flower that you'd like. I like DZs a lot. That's why I make DZs a lot in my artwork. But if you have a different type of a flower that you'd like to use, go ahead and do that. Make sure that you make your daisies or your other flowers large enough to fill up quite a bit of space. As you can see, this daisy went off of my piece of paper, and that's perfectly fine. I think I might have room for one up here, smaller one. I'm not sure if you can see this, but there's a flower up there at the top. And then I think I'll put one here as well. Maybe not quite as big. And then maybe I'll put one here, maybe a half flower. So basically I'm just looking at the space that I have on my piece of paper and then deciding if I want to put something there or not. I think I'll put a leaf here. Maybe a leaf here. This will just fill up more species. And the way that I make leaves is I just make two curved lines and make sure that they hook together. If there is a different type of a leaf that you'd like to use, go ahead and use it. Maybe I'll even have a leaf coming out right here. So just keep filling in your background until you are happy with your artwork. And then in the next step, we are going to come back and we are going to apply watercolor paints. So I'll see you back here in the next video. 3. Step 2: Paint the Design: In this step we are going to be painting our folk art birds. So let's get started. The first thing that we're going to want to do is add a drop or two of water to each of our pans of paint. And what that will do is it will soften up our paint a little bit so that we can use it more easily. It'll dissolve the paint just a little bit. It's a step that you'll want to take because it makes things so much easier. Now that our paint is softening up, Let's turn our attention to our artwork. Plan out in your mind the colors that you're thinking about using. It's okay if you change your mind once you decide on something, you can always change your mind when you're doing art. That's the really cool thing about art. You get to change your mind if you want to. I'm going to have a black background because I like the way that art looks when there's a black background and the colors just pop out. So plan out the colors that you'd like to use. I think for my bird, I'm going to use blues and greens, maybe a little bit of purple. And then I like to use yellows and oranges and pinks for my flowers. So I might use a combination of that and then green for my leaves. All right, so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to start painting. And like I said before, if you are, if your paint is all softened up, it will make it a lot easier to use. So I'm going to go ahead and try to stay inside the lines for this project. If I go a little bit outside the lines, That's okay. I'm not going to worry about it too much, but I am going to try my best. And what I want do is I will paint my bird and my flowers first. And then in the next step I'll come back and I will paint my background black. So I'm going to speed up this video and you can watch me. It'll only take a minute or so, and then we will talk about the next step. All right, friends, I'm finished with my bird painting and my flowers and leaves. When we come back, we will be painting the background. So I'll see you back here in the next video. 4. Step 3: Paint the Background: In this step, I'm going to apply some black paint to my background. So let me show you how I'm going to mix the black paint. I'm actually going to put some water in one of the wells here. And I'm going to mix quite a bit of water with a little bit of flack. Because like I said before, black is a pretty powerful color and you have to be careful with it when you're putting it on the piece of paper because it will overwhelm everything if you're not careful. So I mix my black paint with a lot of water and that will turn it into this beautiful grayish, blackish color. So that's what I'm going to do. If I need to get more black paint, blackish grayish paint, then I will just make some more using a lot of water and a little bit of black paint. I'm going to speed up this video so you can watch me paint. But I'm really in real life going to be painting very carefully because I want to do my best work. So I'll see you back here in just a minute. Already friends, I'm finished with my black background. I really like the way that it turned out this painting. And I hope that you enjoyed this lesson because I sure enjoyed teaching it. I hope you have a great day and I will see you next time.