Art for Kids: Drawing and Painting a Polar Bear Swimming in the Sea

1. Introduction to This Project and Supplies You Will Need: 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 drawing and watercolor painting 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, this space, a cute little polar bear that's bobbing around in the freezing cold water. I'd like to go over the supplies and the materials that you will need for this project. The first thing that you'll need is a piece of watercolor paper. You will need some watercolor paints. You will need a paintbrush. You will need some water, some clean water and a bowl or a cup. You will also need either a black oil pastel or a black crayon and a white oil pastel or a white crayon. And then you'll also need a paper towel. So go ahead and collect all of those supplies and materials. And let's get started. 2. Step 1: Draw a Polar Bear: All righty friends. So in this step, what we're going to do is we're going to draw our polar bear poking out of the water. And we're also going to draw some snowflakes. So let's get started. I'm going to grab my black oil pastel, and I'm going to take a look at my paper. At the bottom of my piece of paper, I am going to make the ocean that my polar bear is going to be swimming in. And he's just going to be swimming stationary way, which means he's just going to be kinda treading water and popping his head up out of the water. Alright, so let's go ahead and make some small little waves of the ocean for him to be swimming in. So I'm going to be making some kind of wavy lines and curved lines. And I'm going to start about this far up. And I'm just going to make some curved lines coming up and then coming down. Just so they kinda look like an ocean. So maybe I'll make a little wave coming here. And maybe I'll make a little wave coming here. Just like this. All right, I think that's good. So as you can see, I have my waves. They're very small waves and my polar bears going to be popping up out of those waves out of the water. All right, so I'm going to make my polar bear now and I'm going to make him, I would say mid-size, not super tiny or super-large, but maybe midsize about this big. So watch what I do first. So I come up from my water, I come over and then I come down. Alright, so here's my water, and here's my polar bear. I'm going to make some ears at the top on the sides. Polar bears don't have huge ears, so I'm going to make them pretty small. Put a little bit of detail inside. Now I'm going to make my polar bears fees because he is popping up out of the water. So this is going to be the bottom part of his nose. Just a really wide letter, you kind of a curve line. It kinda looks like a smile, but it's actually not the smile is the under part of his nose. And then above this, I'm going to make his actual nodes. So I have a straight line. And then I come up with a curved line and then I'm going to fill that in. Except I'm going to leave a little bit of a space here at the top. The reason why we're leaving that little space without any oil pastel on it is because that's the reflection mark. So the source of light, which could be the sun, it can bounce off of his nose and show a little bit of a shine mark. Let's put his little mouth underneath. And now you can see that this is the bottom part of his nose or his chin. Alright, let's make some eye. Polar bears don't have really big eyes. And there we go. If you want to add a little tiny bit of detail underneath, you can go ahead and do that just to show a few little wrinkles. Now what we're going to do is add a little bit more detail to the background. So I'm going to add a little bit more water coming out from our polar bear. So make some more lines just wherever you feel. Like you could use some lines. And then I'm going to put some actual ice. So maybe I'll put little iceberg right here, maybe a little iceberg right here. They don't have to be the same size. And then I'm just adding some more lines for detail. Maybe I'll add a bigger iceberg here. Maybe I'll cut that into sections like this. And then maybe I'll make another one over here to balance my artwork out a little bit. So take a look at your artwork and decide if there's any thing else that you'd like to add before we start working on this guy. Already at this point, you might have a little bit of black oil pastel on your finger, because oil pastels really soft and so it might get on your fingers which stops fine. But why don't you go ahead and wipe that off with your tissue or your paper towel before you pick up your white oil pastel. So your black oil pastel doesn't get on your wide world pesto. Now with this oil pastel, you can either dots for little bits of snow or you can add big snowflakes. Just go ahead and put some white oil pastel in this top part of your drawing. And I think I'm just going to make some dots. I know you can't see them because we're using white oil pastel on white paper. But I can see them a little bit. So I'm going to go ahead and make quite a few just dots on my piece of paper. And if you think that you'd like to use crayon instead, you can go ahead and do that. I'm just going to make sure I get a lot and white dots on there. And if you can think of a different way to make your snowflakes, go ahead and use that way. This is your artwork, so you get to design your own snowflakes. I'm going to put a bunch on there. All right, I think that's good for my drawing. So what we're going to do now is we are going to start painting. And in the next step, I will come back and I will show you and give you some suggestions on how to do that. I'll see you back in just a minute. 3. Step 2: Paint the Polar Bear Design With Watercolor Paints: Hi friends, welcome back. So what we're going to do in this step is we're going to add some watercolor paints to our drawing. So let's prepare our watercolor paints first. The first thing that we're going to do is we're going to put a drop of water in each pan of paint. And so I'm going to take the time to do that because what this does is it dissolves the paints, gets them ready for us to use. Here we go. And then let's take a look at our artwork. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to leave my polar bear white because polar bears appear to be white. And I'm also going to leave my chunks of ice white, my icebergs white, but the rest of it, I'm going to paint a shade of blue. And when I say a shade of blue, that means some of the colors of blue will be darker and some will be a little bit lighter. Remember, when you are adding paint and water together, the more paint you use, the darker your color will be, and the more water you use, the lighter your color will be. So let me show you what I mean. I'm going to prepare some colors here, some blue, and I'm going to put them in one of my little wells. And I'm going to add quite a bit of water. And so what this will do is it will lighten up my blue. So see how light it is. That's the look I'm going for. Now. If I want a darker color, then I'll just add more paint. But I want my colors to be pretty light because I feel like the water is is pretty light. So let me paint that lower area. Now. I want to make a little bit of a different shade of blue, so I'm going to use this one next. Put my paint and my water into a lentil well, so it's a little bit different than this shade. And then I'm going to paint this down here. So it's pretty similar, but you can tell it's a little bit different. Now if I wanted it to be lighter here, I would just simply add a little bit more water. So I think I'll add quite a bit of water here. And this'll be a little bit lighter. So go ahead and do that. You can paint your water blue. Already, friends. So I'm finished painting my water now I'm going to move up to the sky. I'd like to stick with my same color, blue, but maybe I'll use this blue right here, it's turquoise blue. So I think that I'm going to do that you can pay your sky whatever color you'd like, of course. And what will happen when you're painting your sky is you will notice that those snowflakes that you used, where you used oil pastel, what will happen is the oil pastel will resist the paint and you will be able to see those snowflakes. So I'm going to go ahead and make some of this paint. Let me see. Can you see that in the video? I hope so. It's more of a greenish shade. And I'm just going to start painting at the top and move my way down. I'm going to make sure that I don't get paint here on my icebergs or on my polar bear. Already friends, I'm finished with my polar bear. I hope that you had fun with this lesson. I'll see you next time.