In January we explored painting with acrylics in both my 9 - 12 year olds class and my teens class. Here are some of the paintings we created as they learned about painting with a palette knife, blending, color theory, and paint consistency techniques.

Kids and teens learned how to mix colors from the primaries, learned about tints and shades, and made color matrixes.

They learned about subtly changing the values and hues to create the illusion of three dimensionality with blending techniques.

Our last project in our study of acrylic painting was a pet project. Parents emailed me photos of their pets which I printed out in black and white so artists would not be tempted to use the colors in the photographs. I had students draw the images as realistically as they could onto their canvas. They then studied various color schemes, especially looking at using colors that are not representational. Once they were happy with their color choices, they set to work painting their pet portraits.

Here are some of the pet portraits created by my young artists. Really fun and beautiful work!