Painting Basics and Beyond: Double Sided Painting

 With my 3rd through 5th graders in Painting Basics and Beyond, we continued our study of different painting techniques and methods through a double sided painting.  I was inspired by a few works of art I saw at Legoland earlier this year, where the photos changed depending on the angle you viewed them from.  

With this in mind, we spent a little time brain storming ideas of how we could create our two different paintings using these prompts: 

• Day and Night
• Costume or disguise on and off
• Two parts of a pair like peanut butter and jelly or milk and cookies
• Two rivals, like cats and dogs or Batman and Joker
• A before and after
• Different seasons in the same scene; Summer vs. Winter

The students then took a few moments to sketch out their ideas before it was time to paint!  

We started with painting an under painting.  An under painting is just what it sounds like, the first layer in your painting.  We created two tonal under paintings using a wash to give each of our paintings their own unique pop of color so they would be easy to differentiate from each other.

We then played with a few other techniques; using fluid acrylic to create splatters, using a fan brush to create texture, Impasto (putting paint on thick with a palette knife), and the double-loaded paint brush technique. Phew!  After experimenting with these on their own, they were challenged to use two of them in their final paintings!  Here are few photos of those techniques in action:

Fluid Acrylic

Fan Brush for texture (great for leaves, grass, fur, and hair!)

Impasto technique 

Double-loaded paint brush

Take a look at these beautiful portraits!

This student is working on cutting their painting into strips for the final product!

Unfortunately, I only had one student finish their project in class, but it turned out awesome!  

The rest were sent home with instructions of how to complete with links to the video below of how to cut an fold a two-sided painting:

This was a fun project and the students really had some creative ideas of what two different images they portrayed!  This could also be done with drawing or other mediums, go ahead and give it a try!