Kid's Version -- Latest Art Project

Hi guys!

This week, I want to write to you about a project I was working on for a class last week.

The assignment was to illustrate Noah’s Ark, a story I’m sure you know. There are good things and bad things about illustrating a familiar story. It’s nice because everyone recognizes it. It’s hard, though, because you want to make your picture show something different from all the other ones that have been made about it. If you were asked to make a drawing of Noah’s Ark, what would you put in it? Which animals would you include, if any? What might you change or add to the picture to make it stand out?

After I made a lot of thumbnails (which is an artist’s way of brainstorming, or getting ideas), I chose one idea. Have you ever flown on an airplane? If you have, you would have had to wait in a line at the airport so that security workers could make sure that you and the other passengers weren’t bringing any dangerous things on the plane. I decided that for my picture I wanted to pretend that the animals who were getting on the Ark had to wait in a line like this. It took a long time to get the drawing to look the way I wanted. Here was my first idea:



After my classmates and professor gave me advice, I changed the picture a lot. Here is the drawing I came up with eventually:



Then I drew this onto a big piece of paper and began to paint it. Here is where the magic begins. I used a paint with a very funny name -- gouache. You pronounce it “gwash.” I put down paint in all the areas that I wanted to be colored. Some parts I wanted to be colored but only very lightly, so in those areas, I used white paint. Here’s a picture of what it looked like when I was done with this part. You can see that most of what I left unpainted is the lines around the animals.

Then I did something very scary. I covered the whole picture with permanent black ink!




This is what it looked like when it was done. Not very colorful, is it?



You might be saying, “Sarah Jackson. Do you drink crazy juice at breakfast?” I was asking myself the same question. But let me explain what happened. Gouache is water soluble, which means that even when the paint dries, if you put water on top of it, some of the paint will come off the paper. So I put the whole painting under the tap and I rinsed off the gouache. Because the ink was on top of the gouache, it came off too. But the parts where I left the paper showing were stained by the black ink. This is what it looked like:



I was so happy that it had worked! It felt kind of like magic. After letting the paper dry, I added color to the piece with watercolor paint. Here is what it looked like when I had finished that:



The next morning, I went to class and I showed my classmates and my professor the picture. They liked it and made some suggestions of how to make it better, which I did. Here’s what the picture looks like now:

Can you tell what is different?

I really liked learning how to do art this way and now that I know it works, I want to do more pictures this way. Have you ever done something that you weren’t sure would work? What happened?

I’d love to see any pictures you have been making. What did you use to make them (pencils, markers, paint)?

Have a good week!
Sarah Jackson