My daughter and I love the famous artists. We also love playing around with different paint techniques. We combined the two for these Monet inspired landscape sponge paintings. The sponge created a wonderful backdrop for these impressionist style paintings. We chose Monet’s Water Lilies and Bridge Over a Pond of Water Lilies as our inspiration. These were quick, fun and easy, albeit a little bit messy, but we were both delighted at how they came out.
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What you will need:
Watercolor paper or cardstock
Sponge
Directions:
To prep, I laid down some newspaper. Next, I cut a sponge in half, gave half to my daughter and kept the other half for myself. I also cut a piece of watercolor paper in half. My six year old works better on smaller canvases.
We lightly damped our sponges and then dipped them into blue paint.
We pulled the sponge from the top of the page all the way down the page making large vertical streaks. My daughter and I did this until we covered our pages.
Next, we added green to our sponges and made streaks vertically and randomly around the edges of the paper.
More streaks were added to the paper in white and then in a light shade of purple. They were also streaked on randomly around the painting.
Once we created the desired backdrops, we set the sponge aside and washed our painty hands.
We used a skinny brush for our next step. To add the water lilies, we just painted ovals all around our painting, clustering them together in spots. We used yellow, red, pink, white, light blue, and light green for our water lilies. We layered our ovals with one or two more colors to finish them off.
Next came the Bridge Over a Pond of Water Lilies.
This one I had so much fun with. I worked this one in segments. I drew a horizontal line through the center of the paper and then divided the upper portion in half.
In the upper right corner, I sponge dabbed on a combination of green, yellow, blue and a small bit of red, but you can, of course, select your own mixture of colors.
In the upper left corner, I streaked on the colors using vertical strokes of the sponge.
I used blue, green and white to paint the bottom section. The bottom section will be the pond. This was again streaked on with a sponge vertically. At the very bottom, I made on horizontal strip of blue and a strip of red above it.
I used the sponge and streaked on grass on the side and a plant in the center of my painting.
When I was done sponging in my backdrop, I switched over to a brush and painted short white lines all over the pond to represent my water lilies. I layered the white lines with pink or red paint.
Lastly, I painted on my bridge and voila… a pretty Monet inspired masterpiece.
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