Easy Watercolor Art Lesson for Kids

Learn how to paint a sunflower using watercolor and crayon resist. This easy art lesson includes a step-by-step tutorial and free lesson download.

How to Paint a Sunflower Art Lesson

This project takes advantage of a simple, straight-forward look at a large sunflower, is drawn with crayons and painted with watercolor. The crayon lines not only add a nice texture, they keep the paint colors from running together too.

Sunflowers in Art: From Van Gogh to the Classroom

Back in the late 1800’s, Vincent van Gogh painted a famous series of sunflower pictures. He used thick, swirly brushstrokes and bright yellow paint to make them stand out. He painted sunflowers because they reminded him of happiness and friendship, and even made some to decorate his friend’s room! His style was called impasto, where the paint is thick like frosting. Even though this project uses watercolors instead of oil paints, students can still be bold with their colors and make their petals look full of energy and feeling, just like van Gogh did.

Sunflowers Painting Tips

For your best results, I recommend working with real watercolor paper, and liquid watercolor paints. The bright, textured color that you see in my sample is purely thanks to that combination. You can use it straight from the bottle for a super bright look, or add a bit of water to tone them down. Either way, the colors stay nice and true and it’s easy to paint a background without constantly mixing the right amount of water with a tablet in a try.

One last tip — when making the initial drawing with a pencil, encourage students to draw extra, extra light. Yellow and orange crayons are a bit transparent, so dark gray pencil lines will show through if the lines are too heavy. This is the project to work on light sketching skills, which are always helpful, and can really make this sunflower painting shine (pun intended!).

Preview of the Step by Step Tutorial

Template List of Materials

Directions

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