Dog Art Project [Afternoon Art]

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Our second project for the Afternoon of Art Summer Series is a dog painting. (This post is by Emily.)

An Afternoon of Art

We had a full Memorial Day weekend, so we opted out of going to the park in the morning. We had a chill morning and then jumped into doing our second art project from Home Art Studio (2nd Grade) on an oddly chilly May day. The teacher on the video read a European (link says German and I think she said Russian) folktale called The Three Dogs. And the art project was inspired by George Rodrigue’s blue dog painting.

Supplies + Materials

These are all the things we used for this dog art project. (You can see a list at the end of the post.)

There were the specific materials.

What We Did

We started drawing the basic shapes of the dog.

Then you erase some of the lines to create the outline of the dog’s body.

Then we started painting. I’ll tell you why later. 🙂

We painted eyes and nose yellow. I have no idea why they use yellow.

Then we started painting the other parts.

Then we mixed red and yellow to make orange. You don’t have to mix them together if you have orange paint.

You paint the background orange because on the color wheel it is across from blue. That makes it a complementary color!

One lesson that I learned is not to use too much paint because it can come out too dark. And don’t mix the colors too often because it will come out a different shade every time.

Note from Mom: This project was a little more involved than the watermelon project from the previous week. We had to “rewind” the video a handful of times to see exactly what she was doing. I wish there were a few more tips on how to get into the smaller spaces when painting. We did use flat brushes instead of round brushes since it doesn’t give the exact supplies you need for the project, but I think it still would have been hard for a newer art student to figure out on their own how to do some of the steps. And we couldn’t tell from the video if she had used orange paint or if she mixed red and yellow together, but we mixed it.

Here are the materials we used:

• *Handy Art Tempera Paint 16 ounce
• *Crayola Big Paint Brushes (4 Count Round) (we used flat, but the round ones are probably better for this project)
• *Dixon Ticonderoga #2 soft pencil
• *Sharpie Retractable Permanent Markers, Fine Point, Black
• *Canson XL Series Recycled Bristol Pad, 11″x14″
• *8-Well Slant Tray
• *Magic Rub erasers are our favorite used to erase pencil drawings
• Plastic cup for water
• Water to rinse between colors
• Paper towels to blot excess water
• Plastic tablecloth to keep things clean

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