We have been trying to do colour washing today, and had nothing but failure. There must be some little trick to getting it right.

The sort of colour wash we are trying to do is where you draw the picture then use wet paintbrush to make it run out of the lines and it sort of looks oldish and coloured in ~ more like a faded picture...
Does this make sense? If so please help.... four more groups to do tomorrow...

The paint needs to be pretty runny and needs to be painted on quite slapdash if you know what I mean rather than painted carefully on.

A lot depends on the type of paper you are using. I wet the paper first lightly then use a fairly big soft brush with a runny paint.

You might also like to try inks as well as paint.

I was playing around with an idea last week I dont know whether any of you can use it. You might have done this yourself.

Draw your picture using a plain candle (no colour) then colour wash it in different colours. It's very effective.

We did something similar to that last year with candles, we drew a city skyline with yellow wax as lights & stars, along the fold of some paper folded in the middle, folded it over again and rubbed firmly with the back of a spoon to make a 'reflection' on the bottom half. We then used a colour wash to make a city skyline reflected in water. They were really effective. We also used inks like Tiki mentioned to colourwash backgrounds for Christmas cards.

We used to do swimming at our school and the reception kids one year drew swiming pool and children swimming and waves and probably fish with a white crayon then colour washed pale blue it was lovely. Forgotten about that!

Did you get it sorta out princess?

I know this is a little late, but you can age the paper afterwards by rubbing a teabag over it to get a 'parchment' type effect. Might be worth remembering for next time!

Well, took information to school, as it was the other ta doing with the groups.

All yesterdays work was no good.

Today she used black felt tip and then used watered down paint. Looked effective, but not what R teacher wanted to achieve, but she seems happier with todays result.

The last TA had another way of doing similar thing, but we can't work it out.......

Never mind, but I'm sure to bump into her in the supermarket one day and I'll ask her....LOL