Shelly and her kids use our dragon colouring pages and dragon templates together with some watercolour painting techniques to create some fabulous dragon artwork!
My kids love dragons. They are huge How to Train Your Dragon fans and because of the brilliant creatures created in the stories they now love the idea of creating their own dragons. They like to think about how the dragons might look, what special abilities they might have and even what their character might be. Apparently not all dragon are scary! So we were naturally thrilled when we discovered these dragon colouring pages and dragon templates and immediately downloaded and printed out a whole bunch. I printed ours onto thicker paper so we could paint them.
These are the two colouring pages we used in this activity:
My son started off by painting a few dragons – all the while talking non-stop about the dragon he was creating.
Painting a dragon with watercolours
My daughter decided to stick to colouring in hers – she likes blending colours together and finds it easier to get the effect that she likes with her pencils.
Busy working on colouring in a dragon
With her dragons she tried to stick to the idea of using three shades of a colour together – so if she was colouring in using green she picks a dark, medium and light green to blend together and then she will add an extra colour for the shadows – normally a blue or possibly a dark brown. We try to avoid using black for shading because it does not really make the colours pop as much as using a blue or purple does.
Her finished dragon, with careful shading
I think we ended up with some gems. She had a go at trying to blend with some watercolour paints, but we agreed that it is much harder to blend the colours when you are using paints.
Almost complete. Blending is harder with watercolours
We then cut out our dragons and created a few different backgrounds – nothing fancy. We just used our watercolour paints and painted some A3 pages. We also cut out a few coloured circles. We did the backgrounds separately because I wanted the kids to play around with their dragons and try the different dragons on different backgrounds to see the difference that the backgrounds can make to a picture.
Dragon on a plain black background
We've inserted some coloured circles to change the picture up and add interest
The same dragon on a purple-pink washed background
It was an interesting exercise for the kids and I think they both now realise how important it is to think about what your background is, even if it is just two colours blended together. Both kids decided they liked the look of the background with the brushstrokes going out "as if there was an explosion" – my son’s words. They liked the way the brushstrokes created movement.
Dragon against a red "explosion" background
And they both agreed that the purple-pink blended background was also very effective - even though not realistic!
Against the purple-pink background - not realistic but effective!
Here's a more realstic background of washed green and blue for a very different effect
While we were changing the backgrounds around, we just stuck out dragons down with some blue tack rather than fix them permanently. We can change them up every so often if we like!
Thanks to Shelly and her kids for these inspiring dragon backdrops! Shelly is a home educating parent of two children aged 10 and 12. She blogs at ofamily learning together where she shares ideas on the different learning activities that they do including lots of hand-on maths, arts and crafts and anything else that is part of their home educating lifestyle.
