So I must admit that this is going to be an unfinished activity post for you here. That is simply because someone messed up but, I still want you to see this activity because it is so beautiful. (if done correctly)

I tried finding the link where I go this activity from but, its not on my pinterest boards where I usually pin all these things and its not in my evernote account, so if you happen to come across the place where I got it from originally I’d love to know.

Oil pastels and watercolors is not a new concept. You’ll find art work for kids like that all over the place. What I found different and interesting about this one was its abstract quality.

I do think it works best with kids 5 and up. Our younger kids in camp had a harder time  with creating that double line.

You start out by letting make as they call it  “scribble scrabble”. Then they have to double the scribble scrabble lines.

A black marker is best for the lines so that the lines are nice and clear.

They then take the oil pastels and color in the spaces all over the paper. They should leave the middle of the doubled lines empty.

If you notice in the image above, its all colored in but, it doesn’t look like oil pastels. That is because this child did not color hard.You need to encourage them to press hard to get the nice effect.

It’s actually better to make the scribble scrabbles cover more of the paper as this way they don’t have such large expanses of paper to color in.  They then have smaller pieces to color in at a time.

Some of them will divide their empty white spaces with color even if there are no lines separating them.

So the two caveats here are: Let them do the scribble scrabble all over and color hard.

Now here’s where the mess up came in and why this activity is shown to you unfinished. I instructed the one who was doing it with the kids to let them do a wash of black watercolor paint over the whole picture when they were done.

Instead she gave them black tempera paint. So guess what happened to the whole design? You got it!  It disappeared.

I was so disappointed because I think the ones that the kids colored in by pressing hard would have been gorgeous. If the watercolor paint was thin enough it was supposed to fill in the empty white lines to set off the beautiful pastels.

How about trying this yourself and sending me some pictures of how they come out?