This has become one of my favorite, always successful drawing projects I’ve ever done.
And I learned it all during quarantine.
Yep, yep. When we were all stuck inside with nowhere to go, I did what I do best: get lost in YouTube rabbit holes. I discovered SuperRaeDizzle on YouTube, specifically her bubble drawing video and thought it looked so fun. I grabbed my Prismacolor pencils and went to town.
Before I knew it, I had filled up 10+ pages in my sketchbook of different bubbles.
They are seriously SO. MUCH. FUN.
And SO DANG EASY.
When our school opened up in 2021, I taught my students in class and they could not stop talking about how much they enjoyed it. And whenever I displayed them in the hallway, there never went a day without someone poking their head in my room telling me how beautiful they looked.
LESSON INTRODUCTION
What I love about this drawing project is you can really teach this to any age group. I teach high school grades but I really thing you could do this with middle school or even upper elementary. You can even tie it in with multiple art elements like shape, form, value, color- it really touches on so much!
The first thing I like to do is to either bring a bubble machine in class (great idea from my dear friend Christy) or give the students some of their own bubbles and give them a few minutes to blow and play with them. I tell the students to look closely at the bubbles and to tell me the colors that they can see. They’ll discover that you can see a multitude of colors inside bubbles such as blue, purple, green, pink, orange, yellow and many more.
Bubbles will reflect the environment in which they are in- which is why you will see many different colors!
SUPPLIES NEEDED
After we play with bubbles for a little bit, I give everyone a small piece of black paper to do a few practice bubbles together.
Here are all the supplies we use:
-BLACK DRAWING/CONSTRUCTION PAPER
(black cardstock also works great!)
-WHITE GEL PENS
Uniball is my favorite brand but you can also use the Sakura Gellyroll ones from Walmart and Hobby Lobby. Make sure you get the 10s and not the 05s and 08s. The white ink is not as thick as it needs to be.
-COLOR PENCILS
I strongly recommend using Prismacolor pencils for this project. Crayola is just not near as vibrant on black paper as they need to be and they will not blend quite as well. If you can’t afford all Prismacolors (because they are definitely pricey), I recommend using either Arteza or Amazon Basics as they also work decently. If you can swing it, at least get some Prismacolor whites. You can buy packs of them off Amazon.
The colors we used were: white, light green, yellow, light purple, pink, light blue and orange.
STEPS
- Trace a circle on your paper with a white color pencil. No erasing or regular pencils necessary!
- Draw a few CURVED rectangle/oval shapes around edge of your bubble. This will be one of your “chunky” highlights. Make sure you keep them on the EDGES and not on the inside of your bubbles.
3. Shade in each shape with your white color pencil.
4. Pick one of your bubble colors to blend on top of your white shapes. Blue is always a safe choice as it blends with white effortlessly. But be creative and use any of the colors you wish!
5. Now pick a few colors you would like to put inside your bubble. You can do 2 colors, 3 colors or even 4. Using one color at a time, add streaks of faded color around the edges of your bubble.
Make sure you fade out the colors to make them look realistic!
6. Once you have colored all around the edges of your bubbles, it’s time to add some gel pen accents! This is where everything really comes together. Add a few “speckle” highlighted dots inside your bubble shape.
7. Then outline PORTIONS of your bubble with your gel pen. Very important that you do not outline the entire edge- breaking up your outline will create that thin translucent effect.
8. Continue the steps to create more bubbles. For a fun atmosphere look, add some more spots and sparkles in the background.
TIP: Make every bubble different! Change up the shapes and sizes of your highlights, change the color combinations, size of your bubbles, etc. You can also play around with bubble placement and have them run off the edge of the paper.
Display them outside and WOW your faculty.
I don’t know why but this always reminded me of that scene from Cinderella….Oh, sing sweet nightingale, sing sweet nightingale…..
Anyone else? Just me? Ok, moving on.
If you would like to teach this to your students, I have my project tutorial up on my TPT store available for purchase. Your students will LOVE it so much and the results will be fabulous!
Happy Art Making!
