Activity - Haunted House

I did a test run for an art activity for my mother's year 3 class, and thought I'd post the steps here as well. =) In honour of Halloween, here is a haunted house inspired by the fabulous Jan Pienkowski. 

If you haven't seen Jan Pienkowski's lovely silhouette illustrations, here's a sample:

Image from www.janpienkowski.com

And on to the walk-through:

You will need: 

Paper – watercolour paper is best, but anything reasonably thick that can withstand getting wet would be okay. 

Paint – Watercolour, Ecoline Ink, Edicol Dye, watered down acrylic... anything like that. 

Sharpie

Waterproof fineliner

Brush – preferably one that's quite large.  

My mother will be using cut-out black paper for her class to make the silhouettes, but I opted for doing everything on the one piece of paper (in this case an A6 offcut of watercolour paper).

First I planned the house with pencil, incorporating as many scary things as  I could. 

Then I inked the outlines with a waterproof fineliner (except for the moon, which I coloured with a waxy white pencil to resist the paint later on)

Then I washed over everywhere with ecoline ink (watercolour or edicol dye should work just as well, I was just after something fast).
I started with yellow, and while it was still wet I added orange. I then loaded my brush with plenty of water and red ink, and touched it to the wet paper to make little dots that spread on contact with the water. I avoided painting the moon, but the wax meant that paint didn't soak in to the paper there anyway. The blobby look was the closest I could get to marbling without actually marbling. 

This is the result. Let it dry.

I then took a good old Sharpie and coloured everything in so that I had a solid silhouette. 

And here's the final product. As you can see there are more variations in the sky than there are in the scanned version. Scanners do not like watercolour paper. 

I coloured in the silhouette after I'd painted the background because Ecoline ink can be a bit shiny, and I wanted a good solid black without any watermarks in it. 

2011's Halloween Post.

2010's Halloween Post.