mournful goodbye paintings

Last night we read "A Mournful Goodbye", an Enki Education Kindergarten Nature Story about the migration of a family of Canada Geese. Today, after a brief recall of the story, we painted our impressions of what the earth looked like below the flying goose family, as "day after day they flew over scarlet and crimson, yellow and gold" on their way southward. This first painting is J's.


This painting is Zoo Boy's. We painted with the "color dancers" method, which means that we left our paper wet rather than sponging it off after soaking, and dipped color onto the page with the tips of our brushes, rather than using brush-strokes to apply it. This allows the color to naturally follow the micro-paths of the water on the paper and interact more "organically" with neighboring colors. Judging from our results, I think the paper was perhaps TOO wet, but the effect is still pleasant.

A really interesting note: although I had 4 colors available -- crimson, orange, gold and yellow -- Zoo Boy chose NOT to use the orange paint. This is noteworthy because of the end result -- he has the most actual orange on his page. Interesting, eh?


My painting. As usual, I liked what the kids did much better than my own work. I am seriously lacking in freedom of creative expression -- I try too hard NOT to create something, and always wind up unhappy with the contrived looking results.