Painting with Details, Layers, or Transparencies: Grades 1 - 5

The children have been deep into painting scientific ideas and fantastical stories about color. They have been working hard to reflect on their questions. For example, JT is painting a picture that asks "What if robots had the power to give and take away colors from the earth?," and DM is painting the question "What would a rainbow look like that had all the other colors of the world than the regular rainbow colors?"

As the children painted with the color harmony combinations that they previously created, they discovered that it was difficult to paint small images, even when using a small brush. The children started to use markers or colored pencils to help with the small details of a picture that couldn't be painted. Tracing or copying items from books helped some children to achieve their higher expectations of how their picture should look, while other children preferred to keep their work abstractly addressing their ideas about color.

The children determined that details:

are little or tiny things that you add to a picture,
make a picture nicer or more interesting,
make the paper whole or look finished,
help fill spaces that are blank or white,
and help the people who look at the painting to get information.

Further, as the children worked, layering images and using transparency sheets became important parts of getting details into their pictures. The children determined that layers in a painting are similar to layers in a cake, wearing clothing in layers, the layers of lava in a volcano, or rocks in the earth. The layering process is an important skill for children as they learn to adjust or cover "mistakes" instead of throwing away hard work or starting over.