Teaching art has always been a hard subject for me, because I can’t draw and have no knowledge of many of the different techniques that are used. “Aqua Art 7+” Art Principles Through Coloring is a one-of-a-kind art curriculum that combines many different art concepts through coloring a variety of underwater scenes and water surfaces.
There are eight units in this course, each covering a different aspect of water.
- Transparent Water (4 lessons)
- Underwater Sea Life (4 lessons)
- Underwater Color Gradations (5 lessons)
- Surface and Underwater (5 lessons)
- Stream and River Currents (4 lessons)
- Breaking and Peaked Wave Motion (5 lessons)
- Ripples (4 lessons)
- Reflection (5 lessons)
Joymarie has based this art program on using colored markers and using different strokes to bring each artwork to life as paints can be harder for children to work with and are also messier. Though this is what she recommends, the students are able to use any art medium they wish to complete this program.
At the start of the printable pack, there are Joymarie’s Rules for Coloring and a page that lists the pros and cons for different coloring mediums. It is recommend that you have a large set of 30-50 markers to complete this particular course as you will need a variety of different shades of each color.
At the start of each unit, there is a short description on the topic that is covered. At the beginning of each lesson, there is are some notes on how to complete each picture, about which lines to trace, how to make your strokes and what shade of colors to use. Though Joymarie uses certain colors for particular parts of each picture to help show texture such as moving water, ripples, surface reflection and depth of water, there are also many opportunities for the student to get creative and use colors of their choice. After the instructions, is a completed picture example, which you do not need to print off. The student can refer to as displayed on a computer screen while they are completing their art piece.
Though this art program is aimed for children in grades 7 through high school and I was expecting to use this program with our grade 7 boy, our youngest boy, aged 10, also had a go. Neither of our boys are familiar with many of the concepts used, so we took this slow, completing one art project over a few days. By having completed examples to model, our boys have found this to be a fun and enjoyable art program. They loved adding color to the pictures to bring them to life. The variety of water scenes and creatures is amazing and being able to enhance them with color has been very enjoyable.
We have all learned so much about many different types of art principles, and are very appreciative of the opportunity we have been given to use this amazing product.
This review was written for The Old Schoolhouse Magazine, LLC, and can be found here.
