Outside my window

We're still working on H's book. Monday she decided that her next "important thing" would be a window. Luckily, the Usborne book had another great project for me to adapt. ..

We did a lesson on how far-away things look lighter and greyer than object close up. Showing perspective with color is one on the easiest ways to create depth in a painting.

We practiced mixing colors and painted a background of hills. After that was dry, we painted the window frame and bars and curtains. We painted a flower pot for her window on a spearate piece, cut it out and glued it on. The leaves of the plant are painted on the background and highlighted with chalks.

This is an easy project to do, but still allows for a fair amount of latitude on the part of the young artist. Neither of my kids really likes to have a totally prescribed painting to make. They chose the color of their hills, H choosing (what else?) pink and purple. E chose to make a southwest scene. They chose the style of their curtains, their color, and the object for their window sill. I am happy that E is finally getting out of the use-every-color syndrome. He is finally thinking about what colors might work together in his picture. His choices aren't always what I would make, but at least we aren't living in rainbow land anymore. Lol

I just did predictable-green hills, but they are fine and gave me a good opportunity to show the kids what I meant about color mixing.

I love how these pictures came out. Our little museum is already getting quite full!

His picture isn't quite finished, but I'll put it up anyway...I love the canyons!

Materials:

Paper

Paint (I used Bio Color. Acrylic or tempera would do nicely.)

Brushes

Landscape photos that show 'layers' of hills, mountains, etc.

Tips on procedure:

I started them off looking at some photos. That way we were able to see what things "really" look like. They picked their color for their hills, and we painted lightest to darkest. Don't foget that is only takes a few drops to tint a white base, so add your darker color little by little. Make 3-4 layers of hills, varying the height and contours.

Make sure the background is completely dry before adding the other details.

Oh, and I did help to steady H's hand while she painted the window bars. She never would have been happy with lopsided ones, and I wanted her to feel proud of her picture.

3-d Paper Abstract

Here is a fun, easy project that we did a few weeks ago to get back in the artistic swing of things.


Essentially, we just fooled around with paper to make different shapes, played with their arrangement and then glued them down. The kids had fun with this project and even named their creations.

To see the dimension better, I took the following pictures at an angle:

E's Burning Black River:













H's Tidal Wave














First, I had them choose a 3-color pallette of adjacent colors on the color wheel (red, orange yellow & Green blue purple were their decisions). I did this to keep the project from becoming one of "let's see how many different colors I can cram on a page". My son, especially, would go with that if given the option, and my daughter would just make everything pink. Not that that's bad, but I wanted a little more effort toward composition.

Next, the day before our art lesson, we took the time to paint a piece of paper with different combinations of the chosen colors. They mixed the colors, painted patterns of squiggles, dots, and swirls on top of different sections, and just generally had fun with the paint. This paper will be getting ripped up in the next part of the lesson, so I made sure they knew not to get too attached to their masterpiece. After these papers were dry and the kids were in bed I painted the back of their papers quickly with a color from their pallete so that no white paper would show. This whole step is not strictly necessary, but I wanted my younger child to have some experience with mixing colors, and these patterned papers do make the final project interesting. If you only want to spend one session, though, you could just use construction paper for the whole project and it would be fine.

Next we tore our different colored papers, folding and creating shapes as we went. Kids, at least mine, often get caught up in precision work when they are using scissors. I wanted them to focus more on the colors and composition, not specific representative shapes, so we tore our papers instead.

Finally, we glued them down. We tried to keep one color from being adjacent to the same. As the kids created their art, suggestions of subject evolved, wave for H's and fire for E's. They then glued on more elements to reinforce this impression.

As they worked and talked about subject for their pictures I interjected a little bit of warm/cool color theory. Warm colors are often used for energetic, hot, agitated subjects. cool colors are often used for relaxing, cold, quiet images. Fortunately for me, their ideas of titles for their work played into this theory well. This was a little added bonus of art theory discussion which I had not planned. It's optional to discuss, but worked for us.


Some ideas for 3-d folds:

fan, accordion, curlique (wrap around pencil), fringe, crumpled balls, flat paper glued onto an accordion to 'pop' off the page, tubes...






Extensions:

My plan is to re-visit this assignment at a later date with complementary colors to see the difference in the affect.

Also, all these paper folds can be nicely incorporated into other projects such as masks or a 3-d picture. I am thinking that my son would like an under sea picture complete with curlique waves and twisted sea weed...

A Note about Preschoolers:
Obviously, this is fun to do with little ones, just don't worry so much about composition with them. I would probably still limit their color pallette, though. Here's a great bonus: All this manipulation of the paper is FANTASTIC for their fine motor development!

Materials:
White paper and paints (optional)
construction paper to rip
construction paper for background
glue
strong little fingers :o)

Not just a bunch of hot air...

Balloon Stamping

This is an idea from a video on using BioColor ® Paint (which I highly recommend–video and paint, both). Balloon Stamping is one project that toddlers can accomplish quite as well as their older siblings. My kids have really enjoyed this for a couple years. Balloons and paint...what’s not to love?
Of course, balloons are a choking hazard, please supervise your kids. The Biocolor ® video suggests that if you have a very young child whom you don’t trust with a balloon for safety reasons, you can tie the balloon in the toe of an old nylon stocking.

Materials:
Balloons
Paint (Biocolor ®, Tempera, acrylic)
Paper–smooth surfaced
Paper plate, saucer, or container to use for a paint pallete
Masking tape
Stencils (optional)

Procedure:
Inflate balloons to about 3 inches in diameter–about the size of an orange.
Tape paper to the table so that it doesn’t move around.
Choose 3 colors of paint. Squirt dime or quarter sized dots onto the plate/palette. The dots should be touching, pyramid fashion–two touching on bottom, one resting on top of those.
Dip the balloon into the tri-colored paint puddle and pounce it onto the paper. Pounce all over the paper, dipping to the paint as necessary. Encourage the pouncing motion as opposed to a swirling or sweeping motion. A little experimentation is to be expected, though.
Pounce the same spot again to let the paint colors swirl and vein into one another. The more you go over the same spot, the more the colors will mix. The patterns go from harlequin splotches to interesting marbled texture to...mud! There is sort of a fine line between interesting color mixing and glop, and that line approaches and passes quickly. Practice will tell you when to stop. Don’t be afraid to let the kids go too far on a few pages by themselves–this will teach them more than any lecture from mom. If they just can’t seem to find that line by themselves, you might try stopping them two or three times and asking them to rate what they see at that moment–sort of a ‘cool’, ‘cooler’, or ‘ewww’ rating. Hopefully they will begin to see when is ‘enough’ for themselves. Of course, you may just have a student that really likes glop!
This project goes pretty fast. Have enough materials for each student to try 3 or more sheets. I can almost guarantee that they will want to. (Just rinse the balloons in between sheets.)
When you are finished with one sheet lay it on the counter or hang it on a line to dry. At my house, I’ve discovered that an easy way to dry painted items is taped to the window behind our art table...Sometimes, I am hard pressed to see out that window!

Extensions
Use your Papers to cover little paper mache boxes. Or, balloon stamp right on the boxes.
Stamp onto frames.
Use your papers for collages–flowers, fairy dresses, etc.
Balloon stamp over a large stencil without too much detail.
Print a shirt. Using fabric paint, Balloon stamp a stencil onto a smooth flat surface like a cookie sheet. Remove the stencil and then stamp the image onto the shirt. Stamping directly onto the shirt doesn’t work as well because the paint just soaks into the fabric instead of mixing together.

*Use copy paper, tagboard weight, or the paper which comes on a roll. They all work better for this project than construction paper which has a "tooth".

Layered Look Pastels

Chalk with Monoprint
This allows some experimentation time with chalks, but keeps the project small and manageable. Most children love fingerpaint, so incorporating it is a nice addition.

Materials:
1/4 sheets of construction paper (white or colored)
Chalk Pastel Colors
Dark Paint (finger paint or acrylic)
optional: combs to texture the paint
Tray or cookie sheet

Procedure:
Using Quarter sheets of paper, color with chalk colors over the entire surface. Blocks of color/swirls/squiggles, ordered geometric shapes or random scribble, separate colors or overwriting with different colors...What ever they do is fine, but this isn’t the time for a detailed drawing since we are going to cover part of it with paint.
Set your chalk drawing aside and squirt a small amount of paint (about the size of a quarter) onto a tray.
Smear paint onto an area of the tray roughly the size and shape of your chalked paper.
Design with fingers, scrapers, etc. leaving a lot of open (paint-free) space.
Place paper, chalked side down, on the paint design pressing lightly to print. Lift and see the great design!

Tips/Suggestions
Using colored paper eliminates white space, even for children who can’t or don’t want to color the whole paper.
Try different color combinations. I liked the brown paper and brown paint. Try other dark papers with the same dark paint. Bright colors, like yellow paper with black paint look nice too.
Don’t feel that you have to completely cover the construction paper in chalk. A little of the paper color coming through just creates a more complex-looking design with little work.



Expanding this Lesson
*I've had a number of people say that these look like animal fur prints. I imagine if they were done soley in animal colors the effect would be even better. I'm thinking jungle scene collage...

*On subsequent sessions as your students are interested, introduce blending colors, shading, cross-hatching and stippling.

Finishing:
Since the chalks will be subject to smearing, you can laminate/cover with contact paper for protection. A light spritzing of hairspray also helps keep the chalks from dusting off the paper, though of course, it’s not as much protection as the contact paper.