When I was in third grade, my school was lucky enough to host a week with an artist in residence. She worked on a different project with each grade level. The fifth graders, as I recall, got to cast things in bronze, which was exciting enough that most of the school got to go down to the parking lot to watch. And as fascinated as I was by the fiery liquid poured into molds of apples and Happy Meal toys, our class project-batik flags-was, I thought, the coolest thing on earth. It was fascinating, magical even, to watch the lines we had drawn on our fabric appear when the flags were dipped into the various tints of orange dye. I kept my flag for years, even after my little brother half destroyed it trying to use it in his fort.
While I’m not quite up to attempting a batik project with my own kids yet, this crayon and watercolor art gives a similar result and makes for some fun afternoon painting. While you’ll get better results on watercolor paper, a good thick drawing paper will work well too.
Things you’ll need:
Watercolor or heavy drawing paper
White crayons
Watercolor paints
Paintbrushes
Water and cup
Things to do:
1. Find a good work surface that you aren’t afraid to get a little wet and painty. Lay out your paper and have your kids draw heavy lines all over the paper. Encourage them to make patterns, grids and swirls. You want to end up with lots of small areas bordered on all sides by crayon lines.
2. Using your water and paintbrushes, have the kids brush across the paper, either covering the whole thing in one color or painting each section individually. Using different strengths of the same color gives a more batik like result but let them decide which colors they want. The crayon lines will stop the paint from bleeding beyond the lines, which gives the batik look.
3. Allow the paint to dry and enjoy your new art!
1 Comment
I do remember doing this in, I think, 3rd grade. But we didn’t takea field trip or have an artist visit, it was just an art class art project that our teacher did with us. We didn’t use white crayons, though. Instead, she had a draw with black or dark blue crayons. Then we had yellow, orange, pink, blue and purpls-each one a darker than the next color starting with the lightest color at the bottom of the page and painted a straight line horizontally across, then put orange above that, slightly overlapping the yellow, so out scene/picture looked like it was tkaing place at sunset. I think my mom still has that, some 24 years later. :o) I think about it often, because I want to do this craft project with all the neighbor kids. And I jsut passed my teaching exam and I plan to use this as an art project in my own classroom someday.