I fell in love with the animal illustrations of Spanish illustrator Mia Charro the instant I saw them, and kept them in mind for a potential children's art project.
See the artist's work here.
A few years have gone by since then. This spring semester I finally felt the timing was right to create a project for my kids around the artist's enticing work. We've been working with gouache paint lately, which is the choice medium of many illustrators and designers, in part because of it's layering potential (both dark over light and light over dark), the ease with which colors and values can be blended, allowing for areas of smooth transition, and its bright, bold colors. I figured a Mia Charro project focussing on each of these gouache painting properties would be a great way to continue our gouache explorations. Of course, the learning objectives don't just stop there! More observational portrait drawing practice is always welcome, as is exercising the principe of variety with a goal towards creating good composition and with overlapping in our flowers for a sense of depth. Color mixing is also an objective, as students will mix their own fur colors with all the necessary values to create dimension. Their floral crowns must exhibit lots of color variety too, while also repeating colors for balance. Particularly, their greens must show a range of tones to take them well beyond just straight-from-the-tube green.
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| Teacher Sample in progress |
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Teacher Sample with collage shirt
and white painted background |
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| OBJECTIVES Day 1 |
Day 1:
Students each chose a Mia Charro animal they wished to interpret. Students were given a large beige multi-purpose paper (29x42 cm, 11.5x16.5 inch) and drew their animal face with torso largely on the this paper, making sure to leave enough room at the top for the floral crows. We free-hand drew, identifying roughly where in our paper our eyes should go - often halfway or slightly higher on our paper. From here, we mapped out the location of our other features, always ensuring there is enough space for torso and crown.
The base color of our animals were painted in first, with no details yet. The lighter value areas of our animals were painted overtop of our base layer, helping us to slowly build up the form and dimension in our faces.
The rule is: start back to front, and large to small. Values were continually adjusted by adding more white to our colors, and transitions between colors were smoothed out by blending our edges of colors.
This was about as far as we got on day 1.
Day 2 and 3:
Students continued working on their animals, adding all necessary details, including eyes, nose and fur texture using a small detail brush.
Students began painting the flowers in their flower crown. We started with 4-5 main flowers at the front, then added lots of smaller flowers, leaves and stems around and behind them. Attention and care was given to creating good composition in our flowers with plenty of variety and dimension, and to adding details to our leaves and flowers. Lighter and darker colors were mixed to create value in our flowers. Students were encouraged to mix their own greens, for a broad variety of leaf colors. Greens were mixed with blues, yellows, reds, browns, black and white for lots of different green tones and values.
Shirts/Torso:
Students had the choice of painting the shirt of their animal in gouache paint, or of cutting out a patterned paper and collaging the shirt. In the latter case, students used tracing paper to trace the shape of the animal's shirt area, then traced and transferred this onto their patterned paper. This was then cut out and glued on their animal.
Backgrounds:
Students had the choice of painting their background in a light, soft color which gently offsets the animal and flowers, or of leaving the beige paper unpainted. Those who left the paper unpainted traced the inside edge of their taped border with black pen, so that they too would have a border once the tape was lifted.
Finally, the washi tape was lifted to reveal a light border and our Mia Charro animals with flower crowns are done!
These turned out spectacularly, and with the many little changes and personal interpretations we made to our animals, each is uniquely our very own.
Finally, the washi tape was lifted to reveal a light border and our Mia Charro animals with flower crowns are done!
These turned out spectacularly, and with the many little changes and personal interpretations we made to our animals, each is uniquely our very own.
OUR RESULTS:
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