Dutch Tulip Fields

I had a smaller class the day we did these “paintings” it was nice to be able to sit and quietly work on some artwork for a couple of periods with my students.

I got the idea for this art project from the "A Faithful Attempt" blog

We started the lesson in the computer room where I had them Goggle Image Search images of “Dutch Tulip Fields” and they wrote down the colours of flowers that they saw in the photos. After they looked up the tulip fields they did another image search for “Dutch Windmills”. They searched through the photos of windmills until they found one that they liked and wanted to try to draw. I told them they had to have it approved by me first so that they wouldn’t be doing any crazy super modern looking windmills. Once they found the windmill they wanted to try to draw they drew it out 2 times on a piece of scrap paper.

The students always need to see what we are doing before we start doing it so I showed them some photos from these sites about what we would be doing and what it would look like in the end. We talked about things that we liked about them and how we might be able to improve on the examples (not that there was anything wrong with any of the examples… but everyone should strive to be unique and make their own piece)

Back in the classroom I gave each student a stiffer piece of white paper and we put it on our desk landscape way. They drew a line about ¼ of the way from the top of the page (we are studying fractions in math so this was a good reminder of what that would look like) and then picked a point to draw all our other lines out from.

Some drew the paths really narrow and we talked about how they would have a lot of work to do later on with colouring if they chose to keep it that way.

Once they had sectioned it off I then had them draw really thin sections between each larger section for the green paths.

I drew my own example on the white board as an example for them to follow along with.

Once they were all done drawing the lines they drew in things along the horizon. The only thing I told them they had to include was the windmill they had practiced drawing in the computer lab. Some of them drew farm houses, trees, and fences as well.

This next part they had a little difficulty getting. I suspect it was the word “outline” that they didn’t understand. I told them to outline each tiny section of green with a green marker (naturally, some started to colour in the entire section with their green marker). So every other section would be green on their paper. Once they had outlined one or sections I had them take a small paintbrush with water on it and run it over the marker. They thought it was really cool how the colour spread out.

They then looked back on the colours they had looked up that tulips could be and picked some colours for the other sections of their fields.

I’m not one to micro manage in art class so I told them that they could do a design in each section of their tulip fields or just keep doing outlines. We filled in these with colours using the same water technique.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to use for the sky and horizon but I feel like we use paint a lot in our class so while we were working on coloruing with water I decided that they should also do the sky and everything along their horizon using the same technique (mostly because it would mean it was easier for myself).

Anywho, our final products are below… I think they turned out quite good.