Lighthouse Seascape Mixed-Media Collage

My summer art camp students (ages 6-11) explored mixed media to create a lighthouse seascape collage. We briefly looked at the art of artist Marry Fedden. Fedden loved to depict scenes of daily life in coastal towns. Her love of adding collage elements and using mixed-media to portray the coastal scenery in her native England was our starting point.

After drawing a horizon line in pencil, we created our sky using a watercolor wet-on-wet technique in blues and purples. We then made our ocean using acrylic paint in blues and greens. We set this aside to day.

Meanwhile, we looked a variety of lighthouse reference photos and noticed how they are thinner at top and broader at the base. We also noted how the stripes have a curved shape, which helps to give a 3-D illusion. Lighthouses were drawn in pencil and traced in permanent marker. The red stripes were colored in red oil pastel. We were sure to put enough pressure to our pastels in order to achieve that creamy look. Yellow maker was used to color the light in the tower. Using charcoal stick, we lightly shaded the left side of our lighthouse and smudged the chalk. With chalk smudge on our finger, we added shadows on the red oil pastel area too. Shadow wrapped about halfway around the lighthouse, to create that 3-D look.

Out of a square of brown drawing paper we carefully tore a raged, uneven rock shape. After slightly crumpling it for texture, we added earthy colors in chalk. This was pasted to our sea/sky paper, and our lighthouse was pasted on top. Additional shadows were added where the lighthouse 'sits' on the rock.

The moon was painted with a small round-tip brush in white acrylic paint, with the addition of minimal amounts of blue for that shadowy, textured look. White moon reflections were added to the ocean. Some students opted to add birds, boats and other details once the piece was dry.

*inspiration for this project came from the MaryMaking blog.