Eggshell Mosaic with Watercolor at Horizon Bay

My class at Horizon Bay in Plano has been working on a mixed  media project using Eggshell Mosaics with Watercolor and Acrylic Backgrounds.  I first saw this project on That Artist Woman's blog.  Even though this project was designed for elementary school art students, it is certainly challenging enough for adult beginning watercolor artists.

This project has multiple steps, and cannot be completed in just one class,  For my students, this is takes about three one hour sessions to complete the whole project.  We started our project during our regular Arts and Crafts class and completed the Watercolor portion of the project during last night's Wine and Watercolor class.

This project uses lots of different techniques and everyone's project really show's their individual personalities.

In our first class we painted our eggshells with acrylic paints and created our eggshell mosaics:

Inez painting her eggshells

Once the eggshells dried, we broke pieces of eggshell (a little smaller than a quarter) and painted the inside of the shell with Modge Podge and also painted a small square of Modge Podge on our card board.  Then taking our thumb, we pressed the eggshell onto the card stock making sure it cracked into smaller pieces.

Kris applying the eggshells to card stock

We mixed the different shells together to create an interesting combination of colors on our sheet.  And we painted Modge Podge on the top of the eggshells as we continued to fill up the card.

As you can see, each student's mosaic sheet turned out very different.  Once we finished our mosaic sheet, we left them to dry on the window sill.  If needed, we can add more eggshells to the card stock at a later time.

In our Wine and Watercolor class last night, we completed the second step of our project and did our watercolor background for our art piece:

Painting our backgrounds

This was our first watercolor class, and we learned how to apply a wet on wet wash.  First we taped our water color paper to our board and measured out three equal sized sections ( the paper will be cut in thirds later).  Then we wet our paper with water and applied our paint.  For most of my students, this was their first experience using watercolor, and they all did a great job!

Hard at work!

While our backgrounds were wet, we crinkled cling wrap up and applied it to the wet paper to create an interesting texture for our background.  You really have move quickly and do this technique when the paper is still pretty wet, or it does not work very well.

Our paintings covered in cling wrap

And that was about all we could complete as most of our backgrounds were still wet.  During our next class we will paint our tree limbs with acrylic paint, cut our painting into three sections, cut leaves from our eggshell mosaic sheets, apply them to our backgrounds and then mount our picture to black card stock.

I will post our completed projects after our classes in February.

Today my class will be doing a tied fabric wreath for Valentines Day.  I'm very excited about this new project- this is my first time teaching this project- and will post pictures of our masterpieces later this week!

Have Fun and Stay Creative!

Stephane