Little Picasso's: The Fall Forest

Project number two for these four kiddos was a painting for Grandma and Grandpa. We created a beautiful fall forest with warm colors, complete with initials etched in to the front tree! LOVELY! We used lots of kid friendly techniques for creating the foliage on this painting. See the process below!

4 year old "B" added the ever essential base for the ground during his session. After working on the sky of his mom's painting right before, he was very content to paint in one color and call it done!

"B", it was fast, but it was a very important part!

Love it!

Next up was 7 year old "S". After wheat fields and grass on his mom's painting, this was a little simpler for him. First, he painted in a base color and then he dipped and painted with a coarse sponge to add in some background foliage.

Light yellow, bright yellow, then some fun orange!

Well done "S"! Great start!

10 year old "J" was next. He painted in the trees in the background. He followed some pencil sketches of mine as guides.

These big canvases and different techniques take lots of time and concentration! I observed, "It's a lot of work to paint, isn't it?" To which he agreed and then said, "Usually hard work for me is like, helping mom move a couch!" :)

After all the tree trunks were in, I had "J" sponge paint another layer of foliage with some new warm shades.

Awesome work "J"! I had some kiddos over later that day and they asked if the trees spelled out the word "FAITH". You can see it a bit if you look close, not intentional, but kind of a cool observation!

My last painter for this project was "H"! She worked on this for quite awhile and I was super impressed with her dedication! For our first meeting on this project, I had taped off 3 tree trunks and then we used the gel medium to thicken the paint and spread it inside the taped off lines. This was her favorite part!

Like frosting a cookie!

"H" also used a bamboo stick to carve out her grandparents initials in the big tree.

After giving a few hours of dry time, "H" came back and spend a large chunk of her afternoon building up the foliage. We painted with brushes and sponges, over and over again, to build up the forest leaves. She was such a trooper with this process!

Paint brushes first.... here "H" is using gel paint to highlight the branches of the trees in the fore ground,

and then, dab, and dab, and dab some more!

(Painting in the initials over her carvings)

"H" used the sponge to fill in the last layer of leaves....somehow I missed taking pics of this, but have pics of the forest here show her progress!

After all that dabbing, "H's" final step was to paint dark brown over some of the background trees so they popped out again.

Then, we called it complete! Here is the finished product in the frame they chose to set it off! So striking! A fun little tidbit of info is that in the photo Grandma provided, the front tree had this lone little leaf on the trunk, right where a drop of paint fell with "H"! We thought that was a cool little thing to happen!