In the immortal words of Bob Ross, “there’s nothing wrong with having a tree as a friend.” In this kid-friendly art project from CSMA graphic designer Ina Johnson, you’ll make a forest full of friends as you create your own autumn landscape of colorful birch trees. Kids will love pulling off the tape to reveal tree trunks. Post your project on our Facebook or Instagram page and let us know how it turned out!
Materials
A piece of heavy light-colored (white, cream, gray, etc.) paper or cardstock
3 brushes: small, medium, large
Tempera paint: red, yellow, black, white
Paint palette for mixing colors (a paper plate works fine)
Masking tape or blue tape (any tape that will peel off without tearing paper)
Scissors
Newspaper
Step 1: Tree Trunks
- Use tape pieces to mask vertical lines across the page. These will be your tree trunks.
- Don’t be exact in how you lay the tape but they should be more or less parallel to each other. Take a pair of scissors and cut some thinner pieces to create a feeling of depth.
- Press down on all the tape pieces. Since we are trying to depict nature, there should be some bends and buckles in the tape to approximate natural-looking tree trunks.
Step 2: Leaves
a. Place newspaper under your painting, so you can paint to the edges. Take a palette (paper plate) and put a blob of yellow on one side and a blob of red on the other. Dip the large brush in the yellow paint and blot the tip of the brush on the paper, allowing the bristles of the brush to create texture. Loosely paint many dots on the paper (overlapping the tape), leaving some background. Next dip the large brush in red paint and repeat the same process.
b. Mix secondary and tertiary colors. Make yellow-orange by adding just a little bit of red to the yellow. (Note: Always add tiny amounts of a darker color to a lighter color so you don’t overwhelm the lighter color. If you add a light color to dark color, you will have to add a LOT of light paint to change the dark color). Using the medium brush, add stipples of the orange all over, some overlapping the red and yellow. Mix a darker orange by adding a little more red and then paint some more. Mix many different oranges, adding layers of each new orange to your painting until you fill the page with colors. Layer some last bits of color on top with the smaller brush.
Step 3: Trunks
a. Allow the paint to dry completely. No cheating! Now carefully peel off the tape. The unpainted areas are your tree trunks. Take some black or dark gray paint and loosely paint horizontal dashes along the sides of the tree trunks (the gray, unpainted areas where you peeled off the tape.)
b. Use a lighter gray to paint short strokes along one of the sides of all the trees, to make them appear three dimensional. You can also use some dark gray or black along the bottom area around the trees to add some depth to the woods.
The Final Painting
Created by Andrea Minobe
