Art for Kids: Goldfish Paintings

1. I had students follow along while I demo-ed this how to draw a fish on the board.

2. Students sharpied over their pencil lines and erased any extra lines.

3. Next, they colored in the fish with at least two yellows, gold, or orange using crayons.

4. Next, they used white crayon to make lines through the background (we talked about what water looked like in the swimming pool).

5. We used tempera paint in shades of blue to paint over the entire picture, but watercolor would work just as well––if not better. Students had paper towels on hand to wipe off excess paint (If they put it on too thick, their crayon and sharpie lines didn't show through).

Art for Kids: Black-glue and Watercolor Landscape

I love black-glue. It is such a mess, but oh so fun. Black-glue works great with both chalk pastels, oil pastels, and watercolors. For my Van Gogh class we did these watercolor black-glue landscapes.

Supplies: black-glue (Just add black paint to a regular Elmer's white glue bottle & shake), watercolor paper cut into long rectangular strips, liquid watercolors, salt, rice, & plastic wrap.

1. Students sketched out a landscape in pencil.
2. Went over their pencil lines with black-glue (set aside to dry - overnight works best).
3. Painted in sections with liquid watercolors, and while still wet (really wet– puddling) added salt, rice, or plastic wrap to each section. (Please note: we used some rice that had been dyed with food coloring for a previous project; this created a colored dimpling effect).
4. Set aside to dry.
5. After about an hour, we held the paintings over trash cans while peeling off the plastic wrap and brushing off the rice and salt and … Ta-Daa! Texture galore. 

All my students seemed really pleased with the outcome, and were especially excited to peel off the plastic wrap. 

Below you can see how the project turns out if you use chalk pastels instead of watercolor paints.

Art for Kids: Messy Owls

We did these owls for my Art Explosion camp following an afternoon of bubble painting, water balloon painting, blow art, and every other kind of messy painting technique you can think of. This is a great project for using up paper from other projects or experiments. 


1. I made templates for students to trace out the parts of the owl (wings, feet, beak, ears, and three different sized circles for the eyes.)

2. After tracing and cutting, students put their owls together like a puzzle to make sure they had all the parts. 

3. The most difficult part of this project was glueing the parts down in the right order. For the best results, wings, beaks, and ears needed to go down before the eyes (You can see what happens when the ears go down last).

4. We used our "messy" paper for everything except the eyes and the background color.

5. Lastly, we drew feathers on the owls bellies with pastels and added "shine marks" to the eyes.


For being such a simple project, I thought they turned out pretty cute!

Art for Kids: Chalk Pastel Sailboats

These chalk pastel sailboats are super easy and turn out wonderful!

Supplies: black construction paper, rulers, pencils, chalk pastels, and a matte fixative.
 
1. We followed this how to draw a sailboat all together using pencils on black paper.
2. I encouraged students to outline their pictures before they colored them in. Some did and some didn't.
3. Colored in with chalk pastels. 
4. Sprayed with matte fixative.