Pete Cromer Inspired Watercolour Paintings

Term: 4 Year: 2018

Pete Cromer is a contemporary Australian artist, designer and illustrator based on Victoria’s Surf Coast. His distinctive and unique style of painting involves a combination of shapes and bright colours that represent either personalities, animals or people.

A camp to the Grampians where Australian animals featured heavily in the landscape and environment, provided a great opportunity upon return to school to introduce the artwork of Cromer to the grade 5 students during their visual art sessions.

A slideshow featuring Cromer’s birds was shown to students whereby techniques and elements were discussed. Pete’s recent additions to his collection of Australian animals were also studied and some students chose these animals as a starting point to explore the artwork of Cromer.

Students lightly drew the outline of their chosen bird or animal, and were instructed to include both Cromer’s elements and their own, in their initial sketch on A3 cartridge paper.

Zart Poster Colours – watercolour paints, were then used to paint their animal and background. A range of different brushes were available for students to use and the colour palette selection was their choice. Emphasis regarding the paint application was to ensure full strong vibrant colour coverage and sharp defined edges or outlines.

Once the paintings were completed and dry, the finer details that feature on Cromer’s artwork were studied. It was during this stage that students enjoyed including patterns, lines, dots using Posca markers to create the patterns and embellishments. This provided the opportunity for each artwork to represent some originality.

We spent approximately 4 sessions thoroughly immersed in the Pete Cromer representations, as students enthusiastically engaged in their artwork. They were able to develop and demonstrate various painting and drawing skills and techniques through making and creating their artwork.

Year 5
Apollo Parkways Primary School, Greensborough