Dotted Pastel Art Technique

If you follow The Unlikely Homeschool on Facebook, then you know that we started a new art unit a couple weeks ago...we went from water colors to chalk pastels.  Our first lesson was a simple tutorial of technique.  

For lesson #2, we were ready to tackle an actual aesthetically pleasing picture.  We used some of the basic concepts we learned the week before to create a dotted sunset scene.  (Let me just interject that ART is a bit of a daunting subject for me to teach as the Hubs makes his living as an ART DIRECTOR...aka...Artist.  I often feel a little inadequate in my feeble attempts.  But I suppose you can conclude from the pictures below that if I can do it, so can you!)

Our first step was to draw a circle in the center of our white art paper and two horizontal lines extending from it.  These would soon become the sun and the horizon line.

Next, we used both red and orange pastels to make circular "dashes" starting in the center of the circle and working our way to the outer edge.

Ta-da!  Our sun!

Next, we used a dark blue to make random dashes along the horizontal pencil lines.  

We filled in more "sun" dashes around and through the horizon line using orange and yellow pastels.

Then came the sky.  Using a lighter blue color, we made random dashes across the entire top half of the page.  Then we filled in some more "sun" dashes to make it look as if the sun was reflecting off the sky.  This time we used pink and yellow pastels.  (These are a bit harder to see in the picture.)

The sea came next.  We used a darker blue to make dashes along the bottom half of the page.  To add a perspective element to the page, we made the dashes get further and further apart the further down the page we drew.   Then we added some "reflection" around the sun with more pink and yellow "sun" dashes.

Here are our finished pieces.  I don't think the photo really does them justice, because it is hard to tell the "perspective" in them.  Be warned...it is ESSENTIAL to hold the chalk high above the paper, otherwise the palm of your hand will drag across the page and smear your colors together.

To "set" the chalk, we used hairspray.  Aerosol spray works best, but all we had on hand was the pump version.  At first it will leave wet speckles all over the page.  But, they dry clear and will help your chalk not to smear with future handlings.

Next week's lesson will be a more blended look.  We'll see how that goes.