Autumn Morning paintings

Autumn Morning

by Adeline White

The southwest wind is blowing

The red fox hurries by

The lake of silver water

Reflects a rainbow sky.

The morning sun is shining

Upon the golden corn

An early blackbird wakens

And sings to greet the dawn.

My stinky little camera has not done justice to our beautiful paintings for this week, a lot of the subtlety is missing. At the top is J's painting, above this is Zoo Boy's. and below this is mine. Here's what we did:

1. As I recited "The southwest wind is blowing, the red fox hurries by," we loaded our brushes with red and painted a red circle in the middle of our paper, then used long horizontal strokes to each side, so we wound up with a line of reddish pink on either side of our red circle.

2. As I recited "The lake of silver water reflects a rainbow sky" we loaded our brushes with blue and painted the bottom quarter of our paper blue with long horizontal strokes.

3. As I recited "The morning sun is shining upon the golden corn" we generously loaded our brushes with golden yellow, letting the gold creep up into the red and down into the blue.

4. As I recited "An early blackbird wakens and sings to greet the dawn" we loaded our brushes with lemon yellow and, starting at the top of our paper, painted with broad strokes all the way down and through the red. The result was a combination of subtle reds, pinks, oranges, and yellows in our "sky", a really cool effect that isn't as obvious in the photos. Our "sun" is also much more obvious in real life.

5. I then loaded just the tip of my brush with golden yellow and dabbed on a line of "corn stalks" along the horizon of my painting. The boys did likewise, although their paintings were quite a bit wetter than mine, so they didn't' show up as well. If I were to do it again, I would wait for the paintings to dry a bit more and/or use a more concentrated golden yellow paint.