Shelly has shared some lovely ideas for creating art by combining oil pastels and watercolour paints in this guest post. A fun art activity for kids of all ages!
Combining oil pastels with watercolour paints to create artwork
By Shelly
We are huge fans of oil pastels. In fact, drawing/scribbling with oil pastels was the very first art activity that my daughter ever really enjoyed. As a little kid she loved how soft the oil pastels were and would spend ages scribbling with them. As she has grown older we have kept our love for oil pastels alive by extending the way in which we use them. One of her new favourites is combining oil pastels with her watercolour paints. Oil and water do not mix so the watercolours just slip off the oil. I thought I would share three of our latest oil pastel and watercolour resist picture ideas.
1. Use a colouring page
It could be any themed page that your kids like. My daughter likes the new "doodle" heart colouring pages so we used one of those. We started by colouring in sections of the picture with our oil pastels.
Heart colouring page with just oil pastels
And then we added some watercolours to the background.
Heart colouring page with watercolour wash over oil pastels
I really like using colouring pages with the oil pastels and watercolours as the kids can use the oil pastels for the focus points and then use the watercolours for the background. I personally think it also works really well with animal scene pictures.
2. Templates
Any templates work with this but we stuck with the heart theme and chose from a selection of heart templates. The templates are great to use with younger kids who are not so confident with their drawing yet, and tracing around templates is a great activity for encouraging the kids to engage their “helping hand”.
Using oil pastels with templates to create a picture
You can use templates so many ways. The kids could keep it really simple and just trace around some shapes or pictures; they could colour them in; or they could even decorate them and create patterns or details. Really with templates anything goes they are just the starting point.
Here templates have been used with oil pastels and the background washed with watercolour
With templates we often stick to a fun colour scheme of warm colours verses cool colours. The kids will often colour the templates in using warm colours and then do the background in cool colours or the other way around. It is just something my two tend to do - I think it is because we did a template art picture when we learnt about warm and cool colours and it has just stuck.
3. Draw your own picture
Again you could draw any picture and then paint over with the watercolours. We have been doing quite a few stained-glass effect pictures lately so that spilled over into our oil pastel resist picture. After drawing the hearts, my daughter added a black grid (like the stained glass). She then chose to colour a few of the squares in with her oil pastels and left some of them free for the watercolours.
Adding watercolours to her oil pastel resist design
It was quite a simple drawing but I really like the way it came together. And after seeing her picture I actually think the stained-glass themed pictures really work well with the combination of oil-pastel and watercolours. I have a feeling we are going to be doing more oil pastel watercolour resist stained-glass pictures (wow that's a mouthful!)
Finished oil pastel and watercolour resist stained glass picture
If you haven’t tried the combination of oil pastels and watercolours my kids and I can highly recommend it as a fun art activity.
This is a guest post from Shelly. Shelly is a home educating parent of two children aged 6 and 9. She blogs at ofamily learning together where she shares ideas on their different learning activities including lots of hands-on maths, arts and crafts and anything else that is part of their home educating lifestyle.
You can find more guest posts by Shelly, and a list of all our guest posts, here.
