N is for Narwhal
If you need a winter project for preschool that looks like a true work of art, rather than a simple “craft” (though I enjoy those too!), I highly recommend trying this narwhal watercolor painting! I was looking for a good “N”-themed project—since my pre-K class learns about a different letter of the alphabet each week, I wanted to find a project for art class to correspond to their study of the letter N. We were also in late January, so I thought learning about an arctic animal would be fun as well.
As I searched, I didn’t find any narwhal-themed projects that looked appropriate for preschool, so I created my own. I wasn’t really sure what to expect but the kids blew me away with their finished artwork! Each one is beautiful, and parents and teachers who saw these displayed in the hallway could not believe that they were made by preschoolers!
I gave each student a sheet of 9×12” watercolor paper and a pencil to start. We looked at some images of narwhals and talked about how they are part of the whale family, they live in the arctic (near the north pole) where it’s freezing cold, and their “horn” is actually a tusk. Lots of kids recognized the narwhal from the movie Elf (“Bye Mr. Narwhal!” “Bye Buddy! I hope you find your dad!”).
The National Geographic Kids site also has some photos and facts about narwhals in case you want to show them the real thing!
Step-by-step guided drawing instructions
To start, they used pencil to draw a horizontal line across the page for the edge of the water, about two inches or so below the top of the page. Just below that, they wrote a lowercase letter “n”. That “n” would become the top of the narwhal’s head. Then, they drew a long triangle connected to the sides of the letter n, like a tall ice cream cone. That became the narwhal’s body. To that, they followed my demo to add a tail and fins.
They used black oil pastel to outline the “n”, body, and fins. They also added some dots and speckles to one side of the narwhal, like we saw in some of the pictures we looked at.
Icy Ocean Waters
Then I had the students use only cool colors of watercolor—blue, green, and purple—to paint the water around the narwhal. We just use inexpensive 8-color watercolor sets. I told the students to add plenty of water to each color to make sure the paint would be nice and watery. We did a “wet on wet” technique; the students wet the paper first by painting with just water, and then they painted with the watercolor. They loved watching the colors spread and mix! The narwhal itself was left unpainted.
The last step is to add the “horn”, or tusk. I had some leftover white sticky-back foam paper from another project, so I cut it into tall thin triangles and gave each student one triangle. They used their pencil to draw lines on it to look more like the spiral of the narwhal horn. When finished, they peeled off the back and stuck the horn down so it looked like the horn was sticking out above the water.
Each student’s artwork came out different, of course, but they all looked like recognizable narwhals! The cool palette really gave these a wintery feel. This would be a great project if you need something impressive for an art show—and it only took one 30-minute class period!
Please try it and let me know in the comments how this narwhal preschool art project turns out for your students! (This could certainly work in kindergarten as well.)
Need another ocean-themed art project for preschool? Take a look at our “O is for Octopus” collage!