Art for Kids: Monet Lily Pads

After looking at pictures of Monet’s lily pad paintings and talking about the affects of light on color we began this  project!

1. Using mostly cool colors, students painted swirling water on large pieces of tag board.

2. While the water paintings dried, we dripped watercolor paint on coffee filters for lily pads. A second way to do this is to use markers to color the lily pads then spritz them with water so the color spreads.

3 We glued the lily pads onto our swirling water and made the lilies out of squares of tissue paper layered and crumpled up.

The whole process is surprisingly easy and fun!

Art for Kids: Tissue Paper & Trees

1.     First, we “painted” down tissue paper squares with glue covering our entire background. I encouraged students to use either warm or cool colors, or colors that are next to each other on the color wheel, but ultimately left it up to them.

2.     Second, we drew trees on black and brown construction paper, using this how to draw and then cut them out. We glued the trees with the pencil side down. 

3.     Lastly, I asked the students to pick a season for their trees and add leaves. Some chose blossoms or fruit for spring, to add animals, or snow for winter, while others went more abstract.

Look how different they all turned out!

Art for Kids: Cherry Blossoms

We’ve been looking at art from Japan this week, and I decided on these cherry blossoms. This is also a great project for teaching tints.

1. Draw or trace a circle for a full moon at the top of the paper.
2. Use one color plus white (we used tempera paint). Start with mostly white on the brush and just a dab of blue (or purple) and go around the moon.
3. Keep adding more color and using less white until the whole page is filled up. By the time you reach the bottom of the paper, you should be using the flat color (no white).
4. Set the backgrounds aside to dry. Here, I talked a bit about pottery and Japanese porcelain.  “Blue and White Ware” began in China and spread to Japan and the rest of the world. Students traced my vase template on white paper, cut it out, and painted designs with blue paint and small brushes.
5. While the vases dry, get out your tinted backgrounds and used straws and Indian ink to blow (or drip) cherry blossom braches from the bottom of the paper towards the top.
6. Glue on the vases.
7. Lastly, twist together small squares of pink tissue paper (light and dark) to make the cherry blossoms and glue them onto the branches.

Prep: Cut pages of tag board in half, two vase templates, and cut out squares of light and dark pink tissue paper.

Art For Kids: Greek (or Roman) Ship Mosaics

During “Blast from the Past,” our art history camp at the Corbin Art Center, we did Greek Ship mosaics. We learned a bit about Greek sailing ships and how mosaics were created before we started this project.

1.     First we drew a Greek Sailing ship all together in pencil on black construction paper.

2.     Then, we drew over our pencil lines with a white pastel and added waves.

3.     Next, we used blue squares of paper (I’m thinking a mix of light and dark blue might be fun next time) and filled in the water.

4.     Last we filled in the sky with a sunset-like mosaic of yellow, orange, and red.

Prep: I cut the squares out for the kids in advance, but other than that, there was no prep work! 

Ta-da!