For some time, I wanted to share with you about our beautiful Waldorf watercolor classes led by our Wednesday instructor Milana. This technique is called wet-on-wet watercolor. It is beautiful and simple, and even the youngest children of preschool age can create incredible artwork and learn about colors in the process.
In a classic Waldorf approach the art class is introduced with a sweet story about the brush that goes on to play with his friends Yellow, Blue and Red. Through this little story chidden learn how to correctly use a brush and to wash the brush between different colors. Each child also gets to name their brush. You can hear the introduction story for the children in the video at the end of this post.
Supplies
For this particular style of watercolor class, special liquid watercolor pigments are used, and watercolor sheets are pre-soaked in water. For the purpose of teaching children about the colors only 3 pigments are used (introduced one at a time) — red, yellow and blue. Using pre-soaked paper and liquid pigments makes the colors very fluid, and they mix together in beautiful ways. It is a wonderful way for the children to learn through observation how yellow and blue create green, yellow and red — orange and if you mix all of them together — you’ll end up with a whole lot of brown.
As for as the watercolor paper itself, working on large sheets does make it more fun for the children, as they have a larger space to experiment on. We buy paper at a regular craft store. But as I’m writing this post during the days of Covid-19 I would recommend ordering everything you need from Bella Luna Toys website. If you chose to order from Amazon instead, remember to always switch your link to smile.amazon.com so that some small percentage from your order goes to support a charity of your choice.
You will see in the below instructional video that the owner of Bella Luna Toys recommends also to use acrylic mats. I can see how those would be handy to have, but you could do without them as well.
How-to video from Bella Luna Toys
In closing, I wanted to share with you the step-by-step instructional video from Bella Luna Toys.