Art for Kids: How to Paint a Watercolor Fish

Video Transcript

"For this clip, you're going to make a beautiful watercolor fish, which would look lovely decorating your bathroom. For this clip you need some plastic tubs to keep water in, some water, some food coloring, a sponge, scissors, felt-tip pen, some brushes and some good quality card and a plate to rest on. To start with, we need to cut out our fish shape. Just do a big circle and add on the triangle shapes. It's very easy. Don't make a fuss about it, but the fatter the fish is, the more area you have for painting on. I'm putting my fish on a plate so I don't splash water where I don't want it. And I'm starting off with a wide brush and some water. I'm just going to paint straight onto the shape some wiggles, some dots, some more dots, some fanny outlines for the tail, as much water as you like. Get it nice and drippy and wet. I'm even going to add it at the front, extra water, and just sponge it across. So there's a whole area of water there. So the fish is nice and wet. Top and bottom, but if you can leave some patterns showing, you'll see why later. Now then, we need food coloring and we're going to basically just use a very very tiny amount of it in the pots. Pick the food coloring up on your brush and just allow it to drip on. Drips and drops of dots and stripes. And it'll run into the water and it'll run into the wet areas. Think we'll have a little bit around the eyes. Think I'll do a wiggly line here. Sometimes it drops by itself. Sometimes you just need to touch it to the water, but let it run all over the place. It doesn't matter where it goes because fish have the most bright and beautiful patterns all over. And a few drops of purple in here, put the lid back on, a different brush and then we'll add some drops of purple. I'm touching the dots and it spreads out because it's wet, it's spreads all over the place. You can add some purple into the middle of your yellow, and look how that spreads. It's beautiful. If you tip the fish up a little bit, you can make it run down or make it run across. That area's dry so the food coloring isn't spreading into it, so I'm just going to add some little lines joining the two areas up. Make up the pattern as you go along; it's great fun, this. So I've got blue color here. Just a drop or two. It doesn't need much color, it spreads such a long way with the water. These very bright colors, just about three drops gone in there. Another brush so I don't mix the colors up and let's add some blue. Where shall we put the blue? I think I want some blue stripes here. Ooh, look at them; they're going into the yellow, making a sort of greeny color. Some lines there. If you think the whole thing's got a little bit too controlled, a little bit too definite, you can always have a bit of fun by dropping some water on the top of this. So I could just squeeze my sponge and more color comes out as you go along. Not too much because you'll lose any patterns that you've got. And there we are, a lovely wet fish. That needs to dry. When it's dry , it's already cut out so all you have to do is add on the eyes and the mouth. You could fix it on a piece of string to hang up and move around in the breeze, or you could stick it onto your bathroom wall to look nice and fishy in your bathroom."