Hot Air Balloon Watercolor Paintings

In this hot air balloon painting project, my 2nd grade students learned about types of lines, watercolor gradations and warm & cool colors. I saw beautiful, colorful hot air balloon paintings awhile ago from Painted Paper, which you can see by clicking here. I knew I wanted to try something similar.

The students learned about warm and cool colors. I set up liquid watercolors in little cups inside muffin tins. I have tried so many different ways to set up liquid watercolors to avoid spillage. This seemed to work fairly well. Warm and cool colors were separated. I showed them how to make strips of color and to blend them together in a color gradation.

Next, the students traced a balloon shape using a balloon tracer. They used India ink (Amazon affiliate links to my product recommendations at no extra cost to you) in little squeeze bottle daubers to trace the shape of the balloon. The students used the bottle daubers to draw a variety of types of lines on the balloon. We used these bottles from Handy Art. 

Thanks to Cassie Stephens for the idea on using India ink in bottle daubers!

When the ink on the balloons was dry, the students colored in each of the sections with Kwik Stix. I cut rectangular brown baskets from construction paper and the students used their scissors to round off the basket edges. They drew the basket weave and glued all the pieces together to their background.