Watercolor Hands

I can't believe how quickly this year went by!  This is the last project for Group Two of Art Enrichment.  For this project, each student had to draw his or her own non-dominant hand from life on 5" x 5" sheets tracing paper .  They could pose their hand any way they wanted... school friendly, of course.  ;)  We also asked the students to do a color study in marker on the tracing paper, as sort of a way to experiment with color choices and plan ahead for the final piece.

The following week, we transfered the hand drawings to 5" x 5" sheets Aquabord.  The we began painting the boards with watercolor.  As you can see, watercolor on Aquabord is very vivid.  It looks a lot more like acrylic paint than watercolor.  The board allows an artist to apply color much more opaquely, to use more layers of color, and even to remove color... which is something that is difficult if not impossible to do with traditional watercolor paper.  Here are some of the completed watercolors after this week.  

During the last week for this project, we finished working on our hand paintings.  What I loved about this project, was the way that students experimented with a new painting surface. Since most of the students had their boards covered in paint at this point, we encouraged them to try removing paint in places.  I brought some Q-Tips so that they could removed paint strategically.  One student used a bunched up wet paper towel to remove paint, which is something Mrs. Luker and I hadn't even through of!  A couple of other students tried this idea as well, with wonderful results.  

Since we were going to let the students take their hand paintings home at the end of the year, Mrs. Luker and I thought that this project might make a nice print as a group as a permanent piece in the school.  I took a photo of the hands in a vertical format and created a matching border around the group of hands and added a title at the bottom, just like you'd see on a real museum print or poster.  

I was thrilled to present this framed print to the school last week at our end of the year Art Enrichment Party.