This is easy to set up and a great project. I fill a number of different glass vessels with water and food coloring. Then I arrange them in the middle of the table and put a single light on them. I turn off half of the overhead fluorescents so the students can still see their papers but we can get a good effect in the still life.
The paintings below were done in two stages. The vessels and projected colors were painted on one day. The backgrounds were added on another. The backgrounds are a little incongruous, but that's okay.
The wonder of this project is that there are so many things the students can clearly see to paint, like reflections, shadows, overlapping colors, and colors cast on the tables. They don't have to study the still life too hard to see these things and add them in their paintings.
The paintings below were painted by children ranging somewhere between seven and eleven. I've had students doing work like this at seven and eight. It really is amazing what they can do. We have to be careful not to push them or "trick" them into doing something more adult, but they really do get it. There's not much I can teach an adult that I can't also teach a child.
A good example of something harder for children is the oval opening in these vessels. As an adult, I had to draw, literally, hundreds and hundreds of those to get it. It goes against the physiology of our arms, actually. A child won't likely accomplish really good ovals. But they can understand what they are seeing. And that's incredibly important for so many cognitive processes in life.
The problem with a lot of educators is that they try to get students to learn skills that, in reality, come about through hundreds of hours of practice. What I do, instead, is work on conceptual development that can happen, sometimes, almost instantly.
Look carefully at these and you will see it's the same still life from different points of view. Look how well they got the proportions, shapes, scale, and positions!
