Watercolor Tree Reflections

We've had so many cool art projects these last two weeks!  Maybe with being on winter break I'll get some pictures organized and post about a few.  Here's a really simple one we did for Art2.  We will definitely be doing some variation of this again but hopefully with real watercolor paper.  :-)  We've done so many neat projects with watercolors...I really do need to invest in some good quality watercolor paper!

 

This could be done in 1 day if you had a good chunk of time.  However we split it up into two sessions.

 

Session 1:  

Create a horizon line with a brown strip of paper.  Then we used brown paper to create simple tree trunks and limbs.  Then the kiddos cut leaves from green tissue paper.  We spread glue across the tree trunks and just pressed the "leaves" on.  I think the goal was to cover the whole top with overlapping green tissue paper but 2nd graders don't have time or patience for that so I let them do it how they wanted.  :-) 

 

Session 2: 

We added watercolor around the green leaves for sky since we didn't cover the top with tissue paper.  Then we painted the river below the horizon line.  While wet we added shades of green watercolor spots to represent the reflected leaves and then brown trunks.  The point was to let the watercolors blend...so encourage them to use their water!

Fun stuff! But...next time I'd use bigger paper and real water color paper!  I'd also like to do this with older kids!  4th grader did something similar with evergreen trees at art camp that turned out really cool.  Here are the closeups, if you are interested. (They were wanting the little tiny bit of glitter watercolors that were left!  I'll need to see if I can find some more that stuff.  The sparkle is pretty cool.)