The Ribbon -- painting

The Ribbon

by Emily Dickinson

I'll tell you how the sun rose -

A ribbon at a time-

The Steeples swam in Amethyst -

The news, like Squirrels, ran -

J's painting is on top, Zoo Boy's above this, mine at the bottom. This was a really simple, yet really fun painting, just to play with color and blending. Here's how we did it:

I set out a jar of each color in our watercolor paint collection (Prussian Blue, Ultramarine, Cobalt Blue, Crimson, Vermilion, Golden Yellow, and Lemon Yellow) and we all shared them, dipping our brush only once for each color (and of course cleaning thoroughly in between).

I started out by reciting the entire poem. Then I said "A ribbon at a time" and, with the kids following my lead, I dipped my paint brush into the first color (Prussian blue) and painted a single line with a single stroke across the top of my paper. I repeated "A ribbon at at time" again and moved on to the next color, and so forth, until we got to our last color (lemon yellow), to which I recited the entire poem again and filled the rest of my paper with yellow.

Then we cleaned our brushes and filled them with just water, and, starting at the bottom of the paper, and using long horizontal brush strokes, worked the entire page from bottom to top, blending all of the colors as we went.

The results were simply lovely.