EASY Art Class for Kids: How to Draw and Watercolor Paint a Sunset Silhouette Cat for Halloween

1. Introduction and Supplies You Will Need: Hi friends, how are you? I hope you're having a 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. 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. They will feel comfortable at all times. Today we are going to be creating this cat silhouette. And this cat is going to be wearing a crazy hat. 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. You will need some paint brushes. I'm going to be using these sizes, but just use what you have available to you. You will also need a cup or a bowl with clean water. Permanent marker. Permanent means that the ink in the marker will not run around on your piece of paper If you add water to it, the last thing that you'll need is a little paper towel. Go ahead and gather all of those supplies and materials, and I'll see you back here in the next video. 2. Step 1: Paint the Background: In this step, we are going to add some watercolor paints to our piece of paper. Let's get started. The first thing that we're going to do is we're going to add a drop or two water into each of our pans of watercolor paint. What this will do is it will soften up our paints a little bit. It is much easier for us to use. I do encourage my students to take that step because it does make it a lot easier to use. All right, now that our paints are softening up, let's turn our attention to our piece of paper. Here we have a piece of paper and we are going to add some red paint up here at the top, in the middle. We're going to add some orange paint down here at the bottom. We're going to add some yellow paint. When we add our paint, we're going to make sure that we have quite a bit of paint on our paint brush and a little bit of water. And we're going to remember that if we run out of paint or water, we are just going to get some more. Okay. Just don't be afraid to load up that paint brush with a lot of paint. We're going to start at the top. We're going to go in a back and forth motion like this on our piece of paper. We're not going to go around and up and down and swirlies for this project. We're just going to go back and forth and we're going to start at the top. When we get to our next color, we are going to blend it into the first color. In other words, when we get to our orange, we're going to blend that into the red. When we get to our yellow, we're going to blend that into the orange. I'm going to show you what I mean. All right, let's get some water on our paint brush then let's load our paint brush with a bit of red paint. Yes, that's what I like to see. Now as you can see as I'm painting, my paint is going to run out on my paint brush. I go ahead and I just add more paint. I'm going to go to about right here. If you don't go exactly this same distance that I go, that's okay. Just going to go down about a third of the way down your piece of paper. Going slowly, carefully, I do my best work and I'm going back and four. All right. So now I have my red paint on my piece of paper. Now I'm going to apply my orange paint here. And like I said before, I'm going to blend it in with this red. So I'm going to start here on my red here at the bottom. And I'm going to go over my red with my orange. See how I did that? Because I want those two colors to blend in with each other. Al, right now I have my red and my orange. And I'm going to add my yellow. And I'm going to bring my yellow all the way to the bottom of my piece of paper. And I'm going to remember that I'm going to start here inside the orange paint, because I want these two colors to blend as well. I'm going to start here in the orange, then I'm just going to move right on down, already. Friends. So I'm finished adding my paint, my red, my orange and my yellow paint onto my piece of paper. What we're going to want to do now is allow this paint to dry completely before we start our next step, that's really important. In the next step, we're going to draw our design onto our dried background and we want to make sure it's completely dry. I will see you back here in the next video, after our paintings are completely dry. 3. Step 2: Draw the Design: In this step, we are going to draw our cat design. Let's get started. You want to make sure that your background piece of paper that you painted on is completely dry before you start this step. All right. What we're going to do first is we're going to find the middle of our piece of the middle of my piece of paper is approximately right here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go up a little bit from the middle. About right here. I'm going to make a straight line with my marker. This line will be a nice guideline for the upper part of my hat and the lower part of my hat and the actual cat. Okay, so that's why we're starting out with this straight line. All right, now up here at the top, we're going to start by making the top part of our hat. You can make any shape for your hat. I'm going to make a shape that looks like this. It's going to be a little bit crazy. Slanted line. Slanted line, then I'm going to slant the line back. Then I'm going to go, maybe this way. Then I'm going to come over like this with another straight line. Then I'm going to come up, then I'm going to make some lines that are straight, but are going to go into a spiral. Then I'm going to close up that shape. I'm going to come straight here, up a little over like this. It's a crazy shape for a hat. All right, now what we're going to do is we're going to make the bottom part of our hat. I'm going to make another line, straight line coming down on either side of that initial line. And then close that up, that turns into a rectangle. Now I'm going to make a sideways letter, V, that's pretty big. Another sideways letter, that's pretty big. Then two more Vs coming down. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to connect these two V's with another line going this way, and this way it comes up to a point right here in the middle. This is going to be our crazy cat hat, okay? All right, The next thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to make a curved line right here. And this is going to be my cat's head and face. I'm going to make a curve line coming down and then going back up and then touching the hat right there inside of the cat's face, I'm going to make two big eyes. Now when I say big, they're going to be giant an eye here and an eye here. Then I'm going to make some lines for the pupils inside those eyes and double those up. Now remember we're not going to be able to see the details because this is going to be a silhouette. Then I'm going to want to make some whiskers. Just going to make two whiskers coming out from the side of that face. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a small neck, very small neck, two lines coming down. Then I'm going to make some shoulders. The body on this cat might be smaller than the head. And that's okay, because this is a cartoon cat, right? Bring these lines down a little bit farther. So these are the shoulders of the cat. Remember this is silhouette. So we're not going to be able to see the details now. We're going to make the knees. These are the knees. And then we're going to close up at the bottom. Now that we have the hat, and the face, and head, and the body of our cat, let's make a tail. You can make your tail on the left side or the right side of your cat. I'm going to go onto the right side. I think I'll make a tail here. I want it to be a little bit pointy and then come back in. There's my tail. There we go, there's my cat. Now I'm going to add a little bit of detail. I'm going to add some grass down here at the bottom. Just some zigzag lines going across like this. Remember we're not going to put any detail down here at the very bottom because all of this is going to be filled in with black paint. You can put something else here. You can maybe I'll put a little Jack 0 ' lantern here. Jack 0 ' lantern, that looks like this. I have two curve lines close up at the top. And then I'll make a small space here, just a mouth, because I don't have that much space on my jack of lantern. I really like to make bats when I'm making Halloween drawings or paintings. So I'm going to make two curve lines, and then I'm going to close those up with more curve lines. It's my favorite way to make a bat. We'll make another bat here, then. One more bat here. Do you see how I connect this line that's curved to the center here? If there's anything else that you'd like to add to your drawing, go ahead and do it right now. Remember, we are going to be filling in a lot of these ****** with the black paint. We're not going to be adding a lot of detail. Sound Good. All right, in the next step what we're going to do is we are going to apply some black paint to our design. Go ahead and make sure that you put your cap back on your marker all the way so it doesn't dry out. And I will see you back here in the next video. 4. Step 3: Paint the Design: In this step, we are going to add some black paint to our cat, silhouette design. 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 just our black paint. Because we're only going to be using our black paint today. While this paint is softening up. Let's turn our attention to our design, because this is a silhouette. We are going to be painting most of this design with black paint. There are going to be a few areas where we're not going to apply the black paint, and I'm going to talk to you about that right now. Do you see this stripe right here? We're not going to apply black paint to this stripe on the hat. We're not going to apply black paint to the eyes or the pumpkins eyes, nose and mouth. All right. All the other areas that are inside the bat, the hat, the cat's head and body, and the grass, all of those areas are going to have this black paint applied to it. Okay? So you can use your larger paint brush or your smaller paint brush. It's completely up to you for this type of a design. I usually like to use my smaller paint brush, but I like to have my larger paint brush available. Just use what you have available to you and it will work out just fine. All right. I think that my black paint is ready to go, so I'm going to use my smaller paintbrush to get into the smaller areas. I'm going to make sure that I have quite a bit of paint on my paint brush. Load my paint brush up with this black paint. I want it to be nice and dark, and black because when we're creating a silhouette, it's nice to have that dark look, all right. What I'm going to do is I'm going to try to stay in these lines. But if I go outside of the lines a little bit, that's okay. I'm not going to worry about it too much. I'll just do my best. All right. What I'm going to do is I'm going to speed up this video and you get to watch me apply this black paint to my design. Right, friends, I'm finished painting my cat silhouette. And I'm really happy with the way that it turned out. I wanted to mention one thing. As I was painting down here at the bottom, I did leave a little bit of yellow showing through, so you can see a little bit of separation between the cat and the grass. But you certainly don't have to do that if you don't want to, I hope that you had a lot of fun with this project. I will see you next time.