An Ocean Painting

Last year, I taught my 6th grade students about contrast with warm and cool colors. We created ocean paintings inspired by Drew Brophy. The students used black crayons to outline their waves before mixing various cool colors for the ocean and warm colors for the sunset. This year, I tried Sharpie markers for the black outlines. I didn't notice any overall improvement in the students' work with Sharpie as opposed to black crayon. With Sharpies, if the students paused while drawing a line, it would result in a dot on the line as the ink bled out. But with crayons, the students really had to apply pressure to make the lines dark. However, one painting really stood out to me this year. The student who created this has done an outstanding job on every art project since I began teaching at this school. I wanted to share it on my blog because I think it is beautiful!