This week’s picture is of an AFRICAN WILD DOG using WATERCOLOR PENCILS and LIQUID WATERCOLOR as the medium.
In this picture, your child explored:
- Using watercolor pencils lightly and darkly to show depth and shadow
- Technique to make surfaces look wet or shiny (white paper on nose and pupils)
- The African wild dog
THE DRAWING:
African Wild Dog
This week’s drawing is of the African wild dog. Some fun facts about this animal:
- Their scientific name is Lycaon pictus, Latin for “painted wolf.”
- African wild dogs are the second most endangered carnivore in Africa. This is due to habitat loss and fragmentation, as people are moving into more and more of the dogs’ territory. Packs needs between 80 and 800 square miles of land to roam and hunt. Most national parks in Africa are not large enough for even one wild dog pack, and family groups living outside protected areas are often killed by farmers and ranchers.
- African wild dogs are most like wolves in their social structure but seem to be gentler within their pack. The average pack is between 5 - 20 dogs
- Each dog has an individual pattern of splotches and splashes of black and different shades of brown-and-white markings. These marking give it one of its common names: African painted dog. Their “disruptive coloration” makes the pack look much larger than it really is.
- African wild dogs hunt twice a day, usually at dawn and dusk.
- When chasing prey they can run up to 60 km/ hr and sustain this for several kilometers.
- Wild dogs are very efficient hunters, with a 38-85% success rate – almost always more efficient than lions and spotted hyenas.
- Packs begin each day with a greeting ceremony. The dogs fill the morning air with excited chirps and twitters as they gear up for the first hunt of the day. They run shoulder to shoulder and then pause to leap over and dive under each other. The dogs appear to “kiss” one another, licking and poking at the corners of each other’s mouths. This is a food-begging behavior that plays an important role in social bonding within the pack.
- There is one dominant male and female, the “alpha pair,” in a wild dog pack.
- The alpha female can have up to 21 pups in one litter, more than any other dog species. All the pack members help care for the puppies.
- With most social mammals, the females stay with the group and raise their young while the males leave to start new groups. The African wild dogs do just the opposite! The females leave the pack, sometimes as a group of sisters, to join a new pack, when they are about three years old. Males generally remain in the pack they were born into. Therefore, packs are mostly made up of males and have very few females, sometimes only one.
THE MEDIUM:
Using Watercolor Pencils & Liquid Watercolor
At KidzArt we use Watercolor Crayons, a great medium for creating lovely watercolor pictures without the mess. (Some classes also used liquid watercolor to color the background of the picture.) We use several brands of watercolor crayons; one is Caran d’Ache Neocolor II Artists’ Crayons.
Watercolor crayons look just like regular crayons; pictures are colored just as any normal picture would be, allowing children more control over color than they can often manage with traditional or liquid watercolors. Once the drawing is colored, however, a paint-brush or q-tip is used to add water over the color. The crayon seemingly “melts,” creating a beautiful watercolor picture!
Ask Your Child:
· To describe their dog’s unique “painted” pattern.
· To point out and describe any unique elements in the African landscape he may have added.
· To explain the watercolor crayons and liquid watercolor techniques she used in her picture.