Watercolor Leaves--4th and 5th grades

For the fall, what better to draw and paint than leaves?  Well, 4th and 5th grades did just that!
Using real leaves, of course, the students employed contour drawing for this project.  Having had class with me last year, most of them remembered what this meant and realized that I knew when they were "cheating" and drawing from their heads instead of really looking at the leaves.

The challenge here is to create a well-balanced composition, drawing large (which can be a challenge in itself), and drawing the leaves as if they just fell onto the students' papers.  I had to continually remind them to not have all the leaves with stems down.  It looks too planned.

After carefully drawing what they saw as a pleasing arrangement, the student traced over their pencil drawings with crayon.  We discussed cool and warm colors and using them for contrast.  The students also used white crayon to draw snowflakes here and there on the composition for a wax-resist effect as we added the watercolor.  Originally I told the kids to paint the leaves with warm hues and the background in a patchwork of cool ones.  As you can see, the students did mix this up a bit, but for the most part managed to still keep warm colors behind cool and vice versa.  This was the most important part for contrast anyway.

Here are some of their displays!