Art Lessons for M

I am doing a trade with a young lady that I know from church. She comes over and cleans my house one week, and I teach her how to use her new Christmas art supplies the next week. It's been great!

For her first lesson I showed her a bunch of projects that we could do with oil pastels (her Christmas gift) and she chose this. 

It is a simple technique. First you take the white oil pastel and fill in an area on the paper completely. Then you take a color and draw over the white spot you just made. Then you take a pointed stick or pencil without lead and draw your subject matter scraping through the color and revealing the white underneath.  Voila!

I make one too so that I could demonstrate the technique. We had a good time and I decided to turn mine into a Valentine for Zach.

I overlapped a few colors for a tropical-fish look and we cut out fish bowls to glue down. We added the details to the bowl with a white oil pastel and a horizon line behind it to create the illusion that it was sitting on a table.

For the final touch I punched white paper with a hole puncher to make bubbles.

M's creation.

Zach's romantic Valentine

The best I could come up with that involved a fish out of water.

Tropical glory.

Basically, my sword-fish was too long for the bowl. So he had to suffer without water. I had to find a way to somehow tie it into a Valentine, and I think I succeeded.