Watercolor of a house. Start to finish

I use this technique with my students regularly and I have found that it increases their enjoyment and also broadens their horizons as far as doing art is concerned. I have found over the years that a great way to frustrate people, especially children, as far as art is concerned is to set them loose with only watercolors or some other paint. The end result more often than not is going to be some nonsensical mess that looks just like someone dropped some paint on the ground.

While I realize that a lot of modern art looks like exactly that I am in the circle of people that think that this sort of art is stupid and I can't believe it is worth any money. Mostly I feel it is a money laundering scheme among the ultra wealthy.

In order to keep kids interested I encourage them to do a pencil outline of whatever it is that they are drawing, such as a house because they can always go back, erase and correct their initial design. It's pretty tough to "erase" paint.

Once you have a basic outline that you are happy with, go back over the pencil areas with a felt tip pen and either do or do not erase any extra pencil markings. It doesn't really matter since we are going to paint over it anyway.

Next you go back over it with a bit of paint and lately we have been experimenting with colors that don't necessarily belong in the areas that you put them in. I am not a big fan of 1 to 1 replicas of a photo, so having some sort of "trippy" aspects to the painting is a lot of fun for both me and the students.

Lastly we put the finishing touches on the empty spaces using some felt-tipped pens. I really enjoy when people use shadows correctly and this is something that we have been working on for a while. Shadowing is a difficult thing to master but it always helps to work on it a bit. It adds a 3 dimensional aspect to it that might not exist otherwise.

This can all be accomplished with about $20 of supplies and that is not just for one painting of course. A $20 stash of art supplies will last a very long time. Art isn't just for the wealthy and I encourage people of all financial backgrounds to at least have a try at it. You never know when some true talent could end up being unleashed in someone that doesn't even know they had it in them.