Ramadan 2013: Watercolor and Mosque Silhouette Art

Hello my friends! I have a fun art project to share with you today. It's watercolor painting layered with a silhouette of a Masjid/Mosque. It reminds me of my childhood and the joy I had making these very kinds of paintings. The ones I made were with silhouettes of cars, but for my kids I decided to increase the spirit of Ramadan and make Mosque silhouettes.

Water color painting and silhouette art evokes so much nostalgia for me. I love it and love watching my kids take joy in painting and creating them as well. The concept of painting rainbow watercolors and layering over it a silhouette is not a new concept, but the creativity behind it is endless and it's a project that never gets old.

What reminded me of doing this project with my kids was this art piece below that a student at the kids' school had done last term.

Black Arabic calligraphy on a background of multi colored watercolor created by a student. 

It's gorgeous isn't it? I can't even do that. Swooning over that calligraphy masha'allah! Obviously, if I'm not a calligrapher I couldn't teach my kids to do it lol. That is where the idea of doing a masjid/mosque instead came from. 

I made my own watercolor paint. Pink was my first go and as you can see it took a couple tries to get it right. But I got it right! Why go buy when you can just use what you have? 

I got an ice cube tray and filled with water for every color we would use. In each square I started with half a pea size of acrylic/water based paint. For some colors like yellow and orange I had to add more paint to get a good saturation. If you add too much color to the water you'll lose the translucent watercolor effect, and it will just look like plain paint. 

I tested the colors out to make sure they were saturated yet watery enough. 

Mosque art: Top image here and a variation of the bottom image here.

Note that for the top image I cut out more windows to allow more colors to show through. I later did the same for the bottom image.

We traced out the stencils onto black paper to be cut out and glued down onto the watercolor painting. 

Z2's art.

 The extra windows gave the entire art a lot more character. I taught Z2 how to use an X-acto knife and with supervision he was able to cut out majority of the windows by himself.

Z1 insisted on this Istanbul mosque silhouette, but the solid black was too much. We had to cut out some windows for more punch of color.

Z1 was a little overwhelmed by all the cutting so I helped out. 

Z2's art. 

Z1's art (in collaboration with mama ;o)

To make the faux matte, I took a bigger piece of orange construction paper, cut it down with a 2 in. boarder and glued the art on top. A true matte would be thicker and placed above the art. We weren't going for perfection here, just something fun and cool looking.  

We stuck them to the wall near the electrical panel. Maybe in the future I'll get them some proper frames, but in the mean time they are so lovely as they are and we are all enjoying the new art. I can't believe something so simple could turn out so beautiful! With ten days left in Ramadan this would be a perfect craft to celebrate the colorful blessings of this great month! Give it a try and let me know how yours turn out. Thanks again for stopping by. 

-Debora