Teachers … need a mess-free art activity for kids?
Take a look at these elf paintings without paint.
Elf Painting Using Marker & Water
Elf Painting Using Colored Pencil, Markers, and Water
Making Skin Darker
It can be tricky to get a darker skin tone for kids to use in their artwork. Start the skin area with a peachy lighter skin toned marker. Allow it to dry. Then slowly going over it with a light brown colored pencil. This will give you more control of the darkness. Use a combination of colored pencils to get just the right skin tone. Even fair-skinned elves will look even cuter by using a pink colored pencil to make rosy cheeks.
Of course, students don’t need to match the elve’s skin tone to their own. This is just an idea of how to get a variety of skin tones with limited supplies.
Elf Painting Using Watercolor Pencil
Watercolor pencils work just like colored pencils. It’s nice to be able to layer colored so that they mix when they get wet. The color ends up looking a little softer than coloring with markers. To help the elf’s colors pop a little, I used markers to outline each area and a light blue marker to put a shadow in the white areas.
If you like the elve’s in this demonstration, you can find the New Year’s Eve Rockin Elf Resolutions lesson on my website. It has how to draw elf pages and also New Year’s resolution writing pages. You can also find it on TpT.
The Benefits of Drawing
Use this infographic to display in your room or share with parents, administrators, or other teachers as a way to point out some of the academic benefits of learning to draw. While they are not the only reason for using drawing as part of a balanced curriculum, they are certainly worthy of celebrating and may help you advocate for including drawing as part of your art or classroom learning experiences.
You can read more about The Benefits of Drawing in this blog post.
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