Watercoloring
in Waldorf Education
Watercoloring in the Waldorf method of wet on wet painting is a skill honed and tool used in Waldorf settings. The at-home teacher may used these methods as well to enhance main lessons. Painting can be relaxing and meditative, but if it doesn’t feel that way to you or your child, don’t despair. You may just need some time to find your way while working with this artistic medium. Waldorf lessons, rhythms, and routines harmonize between ‘in-breath’ activities and ‘out-breath’ activities. While watercoloring may typically be considered an ‘out-breath’ experience, for some it isn’t. Having homeschooled my children since 2003 with a Waldorf inspired approach, I am finally completing my Waldorf teacher training and have learned through lectures and experience that many of the art expressions are not universally felt as ‘out-breath’ experiences. In fact, for some, the intensivity require, produced or experienced from watercoloring or drawing needs extra time to decompress following the lesson. If you find that your child is exhausting their willing, feeling or thinking forces, these lessons will need to be balanced with other activities.
Watercolor Lessons
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Step by Step Watercolor Instruction | Primary Colors
While this may be a step by step tutorial, you'll find that I made a number of mistakes while instructing my 7-year-old daughter. This is a live lesson with no edits, so you'll see the whole process from start to finish. I show how to mix Stockmar watercolors, which paper we use, how to mount the paper and which brushes work well.
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Watercoloring Pumpkins | Kindergarten & FIRST GRADE
Have you ever limited your paint pallet to just yellow, red and blue? Having the freedom to choose from a myriad of colors is thrilling, but equally thrilling is being able to make a variety of colors with just the three primary ones.
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Watercolor Lesson with Story Telling
At times this video is painfully slow and quiet. I decided to leave this as unedited as possible so you can see how a lesson proceeds from start to end with unexpected changes and challenges. At the end of the video, I share some reflections on the lesson. It seems like most recent watercolor lessons have been flops.
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Watercolor Painting Course
Lately, I've been using open glass jars for our paints and they've worked well for one surprising reason: The paint doesn't mold! Instead, the water simply evaporates and and leaves a dried cake of paint which can be rehydrated for later use. This has worked out well for this series of lessons because, while we are working through lessons almost daily, we are not using all the colors at the same time, so some of them dry out and all we need to do is add a bit of water and get painting!
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Lesson 1 Yellow
Lesson 1 is all about exploring the color yellow. It seems simple enough and yet in practice it was really challenging! I’m not sure if the challenge is universal and only felt with adults who have already spent their whole life working with colors rather than creating shades of a single one. What you might experience as you go through these lessons is that you, the teacher, are learning too.
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Lesson 2 Shades of Yellow
In lesson 2, we dive further into the color yellow. Because the Stockmar paints come with a bright yellow and a warm golden yellow, this lesson lent itself well to exploring both yellows together. While this is a suitable second lesson, you may wish to continue exploring yellow on its own during this lesson, but use the golden yellow instead.
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Lesson 3 Blue
In lesson 3, we explore the color blue. For this lesson we made arches in varying intensities of blue. You may find that some students and teachers are firm, defined and somewhat rigid. Can you tell between us which person was like that? If you look at the final paintings, you’ll see how beautifully my daughter’s shades blended into one another. Mine are so defined and in my opinion, not as beautiful to me for what I was wanting.
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Watercoloring Techniques | Waldorf
Watercoloring is one of my kids' favorite artistic outlets. I'm going to show you a few different techniques that you can do using a typical Waldorf technique called 'wet on wet' watercoloring in which the watercolor paper is first wet with water using a sponge or dipping it into a basin of water.
Watercolor Lessons
Step by Step Watercolor Instruction | Primary Colors
While this may be a step by step tutorial, you'll find that I made a number of mistakes while instructing my 7-year-old daughter. This is a live lesson with no edits, so you'll see the whole process from start to finish. I show how to mix Stockmar watercolors, which paper we use, how to mount the paper and which brushes work well.
This lesson is suitable for a grade 2 student, but works with a grade 1 or KG student as long as the student can handle the paint brushes properly.
Watercoloring Pumpkins
Have you ever limited your paint pallet to just yellow, red and blue? Having the freedom to choose from a myriad of colors is thrilling, but equally thrilling is being able to make a variety of colors with just the three primary ones.
Today’s project is making pumpkins using just three colors: yellow, red and blue. We begin by painting the whole paper yellow. This is a good opportunity to tell a story about the bright sun and how grateful the pumpkin seedling was for the warmth and sunshine. Next you add some watered down red to the yellow to make the pumpkin. A blazing sunset might represent the red, or the special transformation that occurred to the pumpkin when it grew from a flower into a pumpkin. Next add the blue to the yellow surrounding the pumpkin to make your leaf finishing off with a bit of red and blue to make the stem.
My kids and I loved this project and now our paintings (mine included) are hanging in our school room.
You can find the Stockmar paints and watercolor holder with jars at A Child’s Dream. Paint brushes and watercolor paper are from Waldorf Supplies.
Find me on Instagram where I post our projects almost daily!
October 2016
