Wax Resist Winged Creatures

Make wax resist dragon flies - My home school art class consists of children ages 8 to 12. These babes come to the Museum to create art. I am there to guide them and provide materials to facilitate their output of creativity. This week I showed them how to draw butterflies and dragonflies by beginning with a large letter x and building from there. After they were drawn, we outlined them in crayon. Next we put the first color over the paper (yellow or pink). We then colored more of the butterfly with a clear wax crayon. We followed that with more layers of watercolors. You can see that some of the crayon resisted the original color from being touched and is visible through the blue or darker washes. This is a similar technique to batik on cloth. I love the texture of these paintings. The children were very proud of their results. They had great fun painting all of the beautiful colors over their drawings. It was kind of like magic.

Below are their paintings.

SUPPLIES

watercolor paper

crazy art crayons (best for wax resist)

watercolors

brush

water

pencil

eraser

silhouette of dragonfly

Directions

Draw an x on the paper from corner to corner

Draw a line down the center of the x

Make the wing shapes

Attach head, body, tail and antennae

Color dragonfly with colorful crayon, press hard, leave white spaces

Paint with watery watercolor over the whole picture

Voila!

Student Work -

Wax Resist Dragonflies