"Veggie-Glo" -3rd grade paintings

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Third graders are completing their watercolor vegetable paintings inspired by a talented artist and illustrator from Japan named Miroco Machiko - here is her example:

                                                               

So often, we teach from master artists who are no longer living, and it was really refreshing to inspire the students with the work of a current, modern artist with a very unique take on natural images. Most of her work involves plants and animals - they have a childlike quality to them with the bold shapes and exciting colors, often with a dark background, creating a "glow." The students came up with the name "Veggie-glo" as they were working, because they thought they looked as if they were glowing in the dark.
Third graders looked at examples of real vegetables and drew crayon contours all around the page, emphasizing the flat quality of the paper's surface instead of overlapping and creating depth of space. Next, we used liquid watercolors for the veggies - learning to make the colors "bleed" - and a final layer of black for the negative space. The liquid watercolor is a luxury and we only use it for special occasions! We keep it divided in trays by warm and cool colors to avoid accidental mixing and "muddy" colors, and the students rotate to get to use them all.

Last year, I sent her my blog link about this project and she was kind enough to send us a reply - read it here! http://dolvinartknight.blogspot.com/2012/10/watercolor-vegetables-miroco-machiko.html

 

 

 

 

This guy tried left-handed painting for the first time due to his cast, and did really well!