What's ooey gooey and colorful?

Fingerpainting!!

Is there anything quite as satisfying to a young child as squishing paint between his fingers? Probably not. There is also probably nothing quite as nerve wracking to mom! It doesn’t have to be, though. I started my kids with finger painting at about 20 months. This is a fantastic exercise for building gross motor skills, and even fine motor skills when they are a bit older. The swooshing patterns are rather hypnotic to the preschooler, and the options for color and pattern are quite varied. Cleanup isn’t as bad as it might seem if you just strip them to a diaper, put an old towel underneath them, and plan on bath time fun afterwards. (Note, though, that you want to get WASHABLE finger paint so that it is less likely to stain cloth and skin.)

Still not convinced that you want to tackle finger paint? Just think about having the little art and prints that your toddler’s chubby little dimpled hands made after he’s grown big. The picture above is a collage of at least 20 different fingerpaintings that my son did when he was tiny. It was his first art, and I didn’t want to just chuck it, but honestly, what does one do with that many fingerpaintings? I cut my most favorite parts out of each and glued them, collage style on a board and stuck it in a frame. I still love it! One of the little squares of green has a swipe of all four of is fingers. The swatch is only a few inches wide–how little he was! Some of the rest of the papers I saved for use in collages over the years.

Ok, so how does a mother finger paint with a 2 year old and not lose her sanity? First, do this activity over something besides carpet. We were always in the kitchen. And, wear old clothes yourself so accidental bumps into a glob here or there isn’t a disaster. Second, teach your child the ‘scrubbed doctor’ pose with his hands. You know, hands held up in front of his body, not touching anything. That is the pose to assume when they need a new sheet of paper or are walking to the sink for a clean up. Third, I taught the mantra "Only on the paper!" Both of my children were always very careful and only once ever deliberately painted something they weren’t supposed to. There were a couple of smudges on the counters and such, but never anything that made me crazy. Even my silly, precocious child was careful since she knew a deliberate mess meant no more paint, markers, or whatever. So, honestly, it wasn’t all that messy or crazy-making. If you still think the house is no place for finger paint, what about the yard with a run through the sprinklers afterward. Now that would earn you the title of World’s Coolest Mom!
The Details...
As far as the actual method for painting, I just taped down some paper, sprinkled with water, and glopped on some paint. One color first, then we built up to more colors. I know some people have their kids make actual pictures with fingerpaint, and I’ve seen some good ones. But I always preferred to just let the kids mess around with the paint at this stage. I didn’t want to restrict their creativity or exploration since kids’ capacity for just smearing the paint into patterns seems boundless. There is plenty of time for ‘real’ artistic instruction. Right now we are just getting the hang of having a fun, colorful, productive experience without making mom crazy. That’s enough restriction...
You might show them, however, different things they can do–swirls, stripes, prints... If you are very brave you might let them try patterns and prints of other parts of their body–elbows, forearms, nose, even a foot. I never actually did this...My mother the preschool teacher said it was great for coordination, but my thought was that if I allowed it once I would have a hard time not allowing it another time when I didn’t want the mess. So we threw balls for coordination instead. :o)
An alternative or additional method of doing finger paints with your kids is to get the bath paints that are available. My kids loved them.
Other Tips:
*The Paper:Use great big sheets of paper. Don’t try to be skimpy, your child will only run off the paper and make a bigger mess (ask me how I know!). A cheap alternative to fingerpaint paper is freezer paper. It’s also more readily available at your supermarket than art paper. Tape the paper to the table on all corners before painting begins.
*The Paint: Just buy red, yellow, blue, and white finger paint. The paint is $2-3 per jar, but it will last you through several kids. The rest of the colors can easily be made by your child mixing them together. I have heard of people making their own by cooking cornstartch and water into a goo and adding washable tempera paint. I’ve never tried it, though, so I don’t know how it works.
*Keep a dish of water handy and sprinkle a few drops on the painting when the paint is getting tacky. It will revive the paint for a few more minutes so the child can finish his work.
*Have a spot ready to put completed paintings. I actually just un-stuck them from the table and taped them to the window above our art spot. It was high, out of the way, and any wayward paint was easily wiped off later.
*I know some people put a toddler in a high chair. We never had a highchair, but I am thinking that the relatively restrictive space of the tray might actually cause more mess than it solves. I don’t know...Don’t discount using a regular table, perhaps with a booster seat, or kids’ sized table to allow them to spread out a bit.
*Above all, have fun with you little one and be amazed at his creations–he certainly will be!

Doodle Bugs

The kids have been really into catching insects lately. They are continually running to me in the yard to show me some creepy crawly or other. After catching about 25 baby grasshoppers yesterday, I decided it was time to do some bug art.

This project is more or less patterned after a project in the Usborne Art Skills book( p273 I believe). But instead of using inks we used watercolor, and I also incorporated watercolor pencils rather than ink or chalk for the details. I think they came out really cute. More importantly, the kids had some great opportunities to practice with several different media.

Procedure:

First things first, we painted a frame around our paper with watercolors. Paint the first color on dry paper so that it doesn't bleed into the middle. You can come back and paint other colors on the wet frame and let them blend if you want to. You can't tell from the scans, but we had some cool metallic watercolor that we used in some places.

While the frames were drying, we read a book about insects. We talked about the various body parts, the fact that insects have 6 legs, the different types of mouths, etc. We looked at the patterning on some of them and drew a few sketches. We also talked about symmetry and practiced a few examples. (Art, Science, and Math all in one lesson? Yay!)

By this time, our frames were dry and we started on our bugs. Using 3 shades of chalk pastels, we shaded and blended the bug bodies. Using a color to contrast with both the bug and the frame we shaded around the bug, adding a couple areas of other colors. Then wee blended the backgrounds, being careful not to smudge the bug too much.

Next came the watercolor pencils. These look like regular colored pencils, but they will blend with water. You can use these many ways, but here's what we did...We outlined our bugs and made designs on them in a dark color, pressing hard. Taking a small brush dipped in clear water, we carefully traced over the pencil lines, blurring them slightly. This made the pencil lines look more 'part of' the picture instead of just sitting on top of, and apart from, the picture. If you don't have water color pencils, you can try less detailed designs with bright watercolor and a small brush or chalk pastels. That, in fact, is what the Usborne book suggests, but I think the pencils allowed the children alot more control, which they really wanted on this project. My kids drew strongly on our Line and Design Lessons and came up with some beautiful, well thought out patterns for their doodle bugs.

After the bug was all designed, we came back with pastel chalks and added a few slashes and squiggles to the frame using colors from the bug and background.

A few flicks of watercolor to add a little more texture, and the pictures were complete.

Time:

This project did take us about 1.5 hours this afternoon, maybe even 2 hours for my slower artist, but they both really enjoyed it. You could also easily split it up into 2 or mor sessions when you switch media. We tend to be marathoners, though, no matter what the subject we are studying, so we did it all at once.

Your Pre-K kids can experiment with these media while you are doing more detailed work with older kids. Let them watercolor one day. When it is dry, they can use bright chalks to shade and mark over the painting. If they are open to suggestions, show them how to choose contrasting color chalks to go over the watercolor. For instance, on a dark spot they can use light colors which will really pop off the page. On light areas of paint dark colors will look vibrant.

Materials:

Insect book (optional)

Watercolor paper

Watercolors or inks

wide brushes and fine brushes

chalk pastels

Watercolor pencils

By the way, the bug at the top left is E's (7 yo), Next is H's (5yo), and then mine...

Pre-K series

I started doing art with my children well before they were 2 years old. I have had several moms say to me over the years that they are amazed by how much I did with my children so young. It's not really amazing, at least I'm not amazed by it... Little toddlers and preschoolers are a sucker for anything that makes a mess or is colorful. Put the two together and they are bound to enjoy it. The real issue is whether or not Mom enjoys it!

I will freely admit that I am on the type B side of the spectrum. Mess doesn't really bother me all that much. But, in truth, my toddlers' art experiences played a very small part in the chaos that sometimes overcame my household. I have no permanant evidence on my carpet or walls of our art projects. I do, however, have permanent evidence on my children's hearts of the joy of creating. My little efforts over the years were a small price, indeed, to have confident, artistic 5 and 7 year olds. I have wanted to blog more about my kids' early years for some time, so I hope you'll indulge me some space for reminiscing about our early art, and in the bargain I'll try to give some tips and inspiration for you to involve your tots in your art escapades.
Look for "Pre-K Series" posts to follow. ..I'm not sure how many, I'll just keep going with what I think of...

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.

Collaborative Quilt--the paper variety

This example was done by my family when the children were 3 and 5. I liked my five year old's circle piece so much that I insisted we use it as the middle block.

Each artist will create 1 or more "quilt blocks" to be mounted together as a family project. Nice for those times we need to reemphasize our cohesiveness as a family!

I found this to be a nice activity for penmanship practice (without the letters). Lol. Learning to control one's writing doesn't have to be boring.

MATERIALS

**Simple blackline designs, 2" square each, at least 1 per artist, extras encouraged(Look in the Photos section for some printable ones, draw your own and copy them, or Use one of those graphic design type coloring books.) You can use all the same design or an assortment

**Black construction paper, cut into 3" squares

**Construction paper for mounting

**Markers--as many colors as you have

**Glue or tape

PREPARATION:*Mount 2" blackline designs on black paper.These will look awfully small, but the size of the paper will encourage pecision work. The Black mat will give a finger hold and disguise mistakes.

PROCEDURE:*Spread designs on the table*Each artist chooses one square (Don't forget yours, Mom!)*Require each child to do his very best coloring.*Allow full freedom of color choice and design. I ended up liking some of my kids' unorthodox combinations better than my own!Each little masterpiece will take between 10-15 minutes.
*Complete as many as they would like in one sitting. Or, have them complete extras throughout the week...Just be careful not to lose any!
*When all the pieces are complete, lay them on different colors of construction paper to dertermine the most pleasing background--do this as a group. Let each child choose his masterpiece to glue on and its placement on the background. Glue designs onto the background, quilt-block fashion.

EXTENSIONS:*Limit the palette of markers to 2-4 colors to encourage design planning and patterning. Show that one color shouldn't be adjacent to itself. Offer pattern examples such as checkerboards or repeating colors (for example...red-white-blue)*Use facsimiles of real quilt block patterns. Each person can color either entirely according to his tastes or with a limited color palette.This would tie in nicely with a culture or history unit such as Colonial America...*Have students design their own blocks on squares using black felt-tip pens. Start with a 4x4 square to allow plenty of room to "design". Shrink the design on a copier or scanner to 2x2 size for this project... this would be a good extension of the Line and Design Lesson*This project makes a nice gift for "Grandma" or other family members...They get a little piece of everyone's work in a nice little package. My mom loved hers for Mother's Day.*This project also makes really beautiful note cards!*Another Idea...Unit Review and Wrap-upHave each student design a quilt block that represents something about any unit you are studying (science, history or geography, Literature...etc.) using a black pen, line art or clip art. Reduce to 2x2, color, and mount.

It's all in the Wrist...

Crayon Flicking

Note: This comes out much better than the scanned images show. I had trouble getting the scanner to pick up all the subtle tones created...just trust me and try it!

MATERIALS:

Crayons

Paper--1/4 sheets (small canvas is less daunting)

Tag board 1/2 sheetsv(like file folders--construction paper can be used in a pinch, but is less satisfactory)

Scissors

Stencils, homemade or bought (optional)

INTRODUCE TECHNIQUE

*Place Tag board across paper at any angle.

*Using a flicking motion of the wrist, draw quick lines, perpendicularly off the tag board, onto the paper.The lines should be close together, and should be made with a quick repetition flick of the wrist, not a deliberate line.
*Vary color if desired

*Remove stencil to see a sort of halo-effect lineThis may be the only step young children are ready for.

PROGRESSIVE TECHNIQUE

*Cut a wavy or angled line through the center of the tagboard.

*Proceed with flicking the crayons off the cut edge, being careful to keep the stroke perpendicular to the cut.

*Use both sides of the tagboard stencil (the positve and the negative) and compare the halo-lines created.

ADVANCED TECHNIQUE

*Make (or use store-bought) stencils.

*Use the stencil-flick technique to create a picture.I made a couple stencils to make a sailboat scene. My son really liked it and decided to copy it. This was not an "assignment", just something he wanted to do. I think it came out very well.The heart is a Valentine he made--his own idea. It was made with marker.