Art Room Britt: Silhouetted Deer and Trees with Aurora

After many watercolor projects behind us, I was looking for a quick project to do with my kids in a dry technique that would give reliable and bold results. We had not done any oil pastel projects in ages, so I though I'd start there. I discovered this amazing artist on youtube: Art Arena. He creates stunning, bright oil pastel landscapes using a blending technique, and incorporates silhouetted images with soft graphite for a powerful effect. This project is directly inspired by his 'Aurora Night Drawing' piece. I loved the mixed media aspect and the process, and since my kids love drawing in graphite, I thought I'd give this one a go.

In the video, the artist draws the deer out by hand. This is a difficult task for any aged student. I wanted the deer to be spot on for a strong and graphic effect, so I opted for a trace-and-transfer technique, and created a stencil to trace on their paper, which would allow my kids to incorporate a perfect deer of their choice .... and learning a trace-and-tranfer technique plus making a stencil are added benefit, AND fun processes. In prep for this stage, I printed out many different deer in silhouette (google search 'deer silhouette') and sized them to be able to fit nicely on our A4 (8x12 inches) sized paper (so the deer are roughly 6x8cm or 2.5x3 inches without antlers).

The artist uses a super soft and dark B10 graphite pencil. I could not find these anywhere, so purchased B9 pencils which did the job. In a pinch, I'm sure a B8 would also work, but the darker and softer the better. He also uses a 'glass marking pencil' for the aurora.... which I also purchased cheaply in a 10 pack from Amazon. A white colored pencil will not substitute for this, since it won't mark over top of oil pastel.
For the pine trees I also printed out several different silhouetted styles of pine trees, to give the kids some individual options on how to draw them.

To begin:

Borders: Students taped down the borders of their paper with painters tape or washi tape. We love how this gives our work a crisp white border when done.

Coloring background: Students choose 4 oil pastel colors plus black - light, medium and dark green, and dark blue. These colors were laid down with light pressure from bottom to top of paper, from lightest to darkest. The top of the sky was colored black.

Lightly applied oil pastel

*Use oil pastels lightly when coloring. We discovered that they blend much better when not applied too thickly. Thickly applied oil pastel blends difficultly, and leaves blobs of unblended pastel. No good.

*Since oil pastels smear easily, we did the bottom strip (the ground) in black LAST, to prevent it from dirtying our light green. A graphite pencil was used to draw a clean line of black between the black and the light green, to cover up any remaining white of the paper, and to add some bumps here and there to recreate an uneven, earthy ground.

Blending: Using a tissue paper that we folded as many times as we could into a triangle, we blended out colors, starting with the lighter color first (light green) and working out way up to the top. This required serious arm muscles. Working in a circular motion on lightly applied oil pastel is key.

Stencil: Students chose a deer silhouette they like. Deers were traced with tracing paper. Tracing paper was flipped over onto cardstock and the lines were retraced through the back, which transfers our deer onto our cardstock. Deers were carefully cut out.

Tracing the deer

* We chose NOT to trace the antlers because cutting them out would be nearly impossible. Instead, we free-hand drew them on our deer once our deer was traced onto our paper.

Trace and transfer. Making a stencil

Tracing our stencil: Students placed their deer stencil in the middle of their paper, with feet firmly planted on the ground (no flouting deer, please!) and they traced the deer stencil. They then free-hand drew their antlers. Deer were colored in graphite pencil AFTER drawing the trees, to prevent smudging the soft graphite.

Trees: Students drew 5-7 vertical lines on either side of their deer. Trees are longer towards the outer edge of their paper and getting increasingly short as they get closer to the deer. This give the illusion of depth. Trees were colored in with graphite pencil. I demo'd some ways to do this on the white board, and students had pine tree silhouette visuals to look at too. Important is that trees are dark, super pointy at the top and slightly wider as they go down, and that they get increasing short towards the deer. After trees were drawn in darkly, the deer was colored in darkly with graphite.

Aurora: Using a white glass marking pencil, students created flowing aurora across their sky. Students were encouraged to think of their aurora as flowing waves, or like pouring milk, NOT streaks of white scratchy lines. This requires using our white pencil lightly in a careful back-and-forth motion until we achieve the clean shape and creamy white.

Stars: With a white paint pen (we used Posca) students created stars. For added depth, we included small and larger stars. Small stars are further away and closer together, while large stars are closer to us and appear wider apart.

Hands were wiped down with baby wipes (this is a messy project) and then the taped borders were carefully removed to reveal a crisp white border.

This is a fun project with lots of techniques, and gives bright, strong, boldly contrasting results.