Tuesday Afternoon Brushwork
Once a week we paint from Brushwork: Elementary Brush-Forms by Marion Hudson — a real 1903 teacher's manual, the kind Charlotte Mason's own schools used.
The idea
No pencils, no outlines to color in. The child learns to make shapes directly with a loaded watercolor brush — one confident stroke at a time — and works up from simple brush-forms to real things she has looked at closely: a leaf, a flower, a duckling. It trains the eye and the hand together, which is exactly what nature journaling needs.
Our term's progression
- Brush drill — getting to know the brush: pressing, lifting, twisting on squared paper
- Oblique forms — slanted strokes, the building blocks of stems and grasses
- Hips & leaves — berries and simple leaves from observation
- Dahlia — first full flower, petal by petal ("how many petals? which way does the stalk curve?")
- Chickens — body-and-head forms come alive
- Violets — finer petal work and color mixing
- Ducklings — the term finale, and the one Pan has been waiting for
What's in our paint basket
- A round watercolor brush, #6–8 — the right size for a six-year-old's hand
- A basic student watercolor pan set (Hudson's original six: carmine, light red, indigo, cobalt, gamboge, pale chrome — any standard set covers them)
- Watercolor or heavy drawing paper, half a sheet per lesson
- A water cup and a rag
- Squared paper for the early brush-drill weeks
Does mama paint too?
Yes — but as a demonstrator, not a co-artist. Hudson's method has the teacher practice the strokes alone beforehand, then work step by step in the lesson: I make one brush-form, Pan copies it, I make the next. Questions come before strokes, never a finished painting to copy. My own dahlias remain humbling. That's fine; they only need to be one stroke ahead of hers.