Winter Sunset Silhouette Art

Make some  winter silhouette paintings using mixed media to create a beautiful, atmospheric result!

With the bare winter trees all around us still, and the houses and buildings falling into silhouettes at the early mid afternoon sunsets, the children have seen lots of beautiful orange and pink skies and black outlines in the past couple of months. It has been a great opportunity to talk about the changing seasons, why it is summer over in the Southern hempishere yet dark and wintery here at the moment, with lots of questions about why the sunset comes so much earlier now than it did in the summer.

We decided to have a go at recreating this daily event that we witness each afternoon using some of our favourite art materials; watercolours paints and oil pastels.

Cakie drew a picture of her school and the trees that surround it, using a black oil pastel to create silhouette outlines. She drew on heavy weight drawing/ cartridge paper which is necessary for absorbing the wet paint later on.

She could, equally, have coloured them in to make them solid blocks of darkness, but she chose to make them this way and they are lovely.

As oil pastels don’t need time to dry or set, she was able to start on the painting straight away (fast projects are always much loved here!) Before she began we talked about which colours we had seen in the sky at sunset times and which ones we hadn’t. The pinks and oranges stood out in her memory the most and she was keen to use those predominantly. I talked about how it often looks like the sky is layered in horizontal stripes as the sun goes down and she then started to wash her colours from left to right in lines across the paper.

She used mainly darker shades at the top and lighter, more orangey hues as she got towards the bottom, but there is no right or wrong way to do this. It is representative art after all and is determined by how the artist views their subject.

We left the finished piece it dry and then marvelled at how stunning it looked! I found a white edged frame and we hung her artwork in the hall-way for everyone to see. We will be doing more winter sunsets soon for sure!

Get the materials for this project! Here is where we found the Oil Pastels
and theseTempera Block / Watercolour Block paints are similar to ours (I can’t recall the brand of ours but they are very vibrant colours!)
[Click through.]

What they are learning as they play:

Art and creativity: blending colours, layering paints, applying a paint wash, mixed media art work, understanding silhouettes

Knowledge and Understanding: talking about the seasons, understanding about sunrise and sunset, learning how a silhouette is made

We have LOTS of ideas here for art and craft projects with kids.

Follow my Art and Creativity board on Pinterest for hundreds of fabulous ideas I have found around the web too.

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