Art for Kids and Beginners: How to Draw and Watercolor Paint a Porcupine in a Cozy Sweater

1. Introduction to This Project: Hi friends, how are you? I hope you're having a really good day today. I'd like to introduce you to this project. This is a cute drawing and watercolor painting porcupine project. The porcupine is wearing a cute holidays sweater. This is a project that was 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 take you step-by-step through all of the steps so you can feel comfortable. I hope that you have fun with this project. Let's get started. 2. Supplies You Will Need for This Project: You're probably wondering what supplies and materials you will need for this project. So let's go over that really quick. The first thing that you'll need is a piece of thick paper. I'm using a watercolor paper here. So if you have that available to you, go ahead and use that. You will need some watercolor paints. You will need a brush, paintbrush. You will need some water, cup or bowl of clean water. You will need either a black crayon or a black oil pastel. I'm like to use oil pastels. If you have that, go ahead and use oil pastel, they just offer a thicker line and you can see it a little bit better. And you'll also need a paper towel for a quick clean-ups and a little map to put underneath your artwork just so you can keep your space nice and tidy and clean. All right, now that you know what your supplies are that you need for this project. Go ahead and gather those and let's get started. 3. Step 1: Draw a Porcupine Design: All right friends. So let's work on the first step of our project. So what we're going to do first is we're going to draw our porcupine. And then in the next step what we're going to do is paint our porcupine. So let's put these aside and grab your oil pastel or your crayon if you don't have an oil pastel. The first thing that we're going to do is come, I would say about a third of the way down on your piece of paper. What you're going to do first is you're going to make a slightly curved line like this. So go ahead and make a slightly curved line. Now from this line, what we're going to do is come down to the center with another slightly curved line and do the same thing on the other side. This is going to be the head and the face of our porcupine. Let's give our porcupine some small years. Porcupines don't have very big ears. And then what we're going to do is move to the inside of the face of a porcupine down here at the bottom. Let's make a little nose, so a straight line and then a U underneath. And I like to fill that in with my oil pass style or my crayon. You don't have to do that part, but if you'd like to go ahead and do that. And then we have a little line that comes down from the nose to the tip of the chin. That's going to be his mouth. Let's go back up here to about the middle of our face. And let's make some old bowls in these ovals are going to be pretty far apart from each other. They're not going to be super close like this right here in the middle. We want them to be pretty far apart. Let's give our porcupines, some eyebrows. Eyebrows offer a lot of expression. It kinda tells how the porcupine is feeling right now. And then what we're going to do last on the face is we're going to create a little bit of detail for our porcupines nose. So see this corner right here and this one right here. What we're going to do is we're going to make a line or a curved line from where these two lines meet in, we're going to go to the tip of the nose right here on the end. So watch what I mean. So you make a curved line here. And then you do the same thing on the other side or curved line like this. Perfect. So there's our porcupines face. Now what we're going to do is we're going to move down here to his sweater, who's cozy sweater. And what we're going to do first is we're going to start with his neck and his shoulders, which we will not be able to see because they will be inside of his cozy sweater. So we're going to make a curve line coming down and another curved line coming down. Now if you don't want to put your porcupine in a sweater, you can just tap this be part of his body, his tummy area if you'd like. But I am going to put my porcupine in a cozy sweater. All right, so now that we have our sweater, what we're going to do is we are going to decorate our sweater last. Instead of decorating it right now, what we're going to do now is we are going to create the coils around our porcupines face. All right, let me show you how to do that. So to create quills, we're just going to make straight lines and they're not going to be the same blanks. And if they're not perfectly straight, That's okay. That's actually a good thing. We don't want them to be perfectly straight because on a porcupine, quills are perfectly straight. So what we're going to do is we're just going to go all the way around. And remember, the quills don't have to be the same length. So I'm going to take a minute to do that. I'll speed up the video and I'll be back here in just a minute. I'm ready. So now unfinished with my porcupine quills. If I see any spaces that are a little bit too far apart like this one, I'm just going to go ahead and add another quill in there. But I think that it looks really good. They don't have to be perfectly spaced. All right, the next thing that I'm going to do, I'm going to take this paper off because that'll be easier for me to use. So the next thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to make a sweater for my porcupine. Let me show you how I'm going to do that. I'm going to create the neck first of the sweater, and I'm just going to make some stripes. All right, then after I do that, I am going to make some patterns going from the top to the bottom. And what I'm going to do is I am going to look out at my pattern sheet that I'm going to put at the end of this video and you can pause and look at if you want to. So I'm looking at this and it's giving me some ideas on some patterns that I can put onto my sweater. So again, I'm going to start at the top. I'm going to create some battery patterns and I'm going to go down to the bottom. And remember a pattern is anything that repeats itself. So I'm just going to start doing that. And you can watch me or you can get started on your own. So I'll see you back here in just a minute. Already friends. So I'm finished with my drawing portion of my project. I think that my porcupine looks super cute and I'm really excited about it. So when we come back, what we will do is we will start painting our porcupine. 4. Step 2: Paint the Design: Already friends. So in this step of our project, what we're going to do is we're going to start painting our porcupine in the background. The first thing that we need to do is we need to put a small drop of water in each pan of paint. And what this will do is it will dissolve the paint so it is easier for us to use. So I'm going to go ahead and just take a moment to do that because it really, really helps when we have our paint dissolved just a little bit. All right, so let me take a look at my drawing right now. I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to paint my porcupine Brown, the background maybe purple or blue. And then as I start painting, I'm going to decide on the colors of the sweater. So let's get started. I'm going to use brown, which is right here. I'm going to put it in my pan. And this brown is pretty dark, so I'm adding some water. So it's not quite as dark. I want to make sure it's not too dark because it because if it's too dark, I'm not going to be able to see the details on the face of my porcupine. That looks perfect. So I'm going to go ahead and paint my porcupine, this cool color brown. Make sure I get his ears. And then I think I'm going to lighten up this color for the other part of his fees system, little tiny bit lighter. I'm not sure if you can see that on the video, but it is a little bit lighter. We go. All right now for the background, I'm going to use, I think purple I've decided in then I might make my sweater maybe green and blue. So I'm going to go ahead and do that and you can start on yours as well. I'll speed up this video. You can watch me speed paint. And I'll see you back here in just a minute. Already friends, I'm finished. I really think that my porcupine turned out great. Helix, really, really cute. And I chose some colors just based on how I was feeling at that moment. So I think I did a good job with choosing my colors. I hope that you enjoyed this lesson and I'll see you next time.