paint cut paste

the other day i decided to bust out the pastels on novi… oil pastels and chalk pastels, both. just because they are called pastels, doesn’t mean they’re always pale and muted — these art materials make vibrant marks!

if you’re not familiar, oil pastels glide across a page much like a really slick, smooth crayon might. (kind of like novi’s creamy crayons, which we love, but they’re more narrow. kind of the diameter of a crayon.) they smear and blend together really nicely, unlike crayons.

chalk pastels are like a higher quality chalkboard chalk… they have a finer dust particle that makes a total mess for really pretty smudges when blending. so we just spent the morning playing around with these new materials, which are usually reserved for mommy, so that made it exciting for the little one.

oil pastel image of a person & duck (labeled!)

novi made a few cool pictures with each medium. with the chalk pastels, we practiced smudging and blending colors with our fingers. some kids (uh, and adults, including me) may not enjoy the dry, dusty feeling of the chalks, or may become frustrated by the way their picture changes, smears, and becomes littered with fingerprints while working. other kids (and adults) really delight in this sort of mutable material. chalk pastels are great to use for learning how to mix primary colors together to make secondary colors.

flower study in chalk pastels

i brought the chalk pastel piece outside (without her) to spray it with a fixative spray (see link at the bottom of this blog for product info.) if you make art with the chalks, it will continue to smear and smudge unless you use some sort of fixative on it, but be sure to spray it where there’s good ventilation and away from tiny lungs.

we’ve been traveling for the holiday, thus we haven’t been crafting at home or updating this blog as often. hope you all had a wonderful holiday! we did, however, find a fun, travel-friendly art material on our vacation. how many parents out there hover while your kids are creating with markers, for fear that your couch and walls will soon be decorated with doodles? well, have no fear – some clear markers are here! i know they’re not that new, but they’re new to me and novi as of this trip: crayola color wonder!

crayola color wonder magic markers is sorta more like… “i wonder where the color is.” these seemingly clear markers show up only on the special paper that crayola also provides. these were absolutely perfect for the airplane, especially the travel pack that we got with (who else?) the tinkerbell fairies all ready to be colored by my little fairy.

she had a blast on the plane with her new “magical markers!” after she got over the lack of instant gratification — it takes a wee bit of time before the color shows up.

bonus: she didn’t scribble all over delta’s lovely seat cushions (though she totally should have! grrrrr, airlines!) and if she had, no one would have known.

my artsy-momma-friend just posted this paper-towel-art project on her pink & green mama blog, and i knew that we had to try out right away. anything having to do with markers and rainbows makes novi squeal with glee! (if you’ll recall our last wet marker activity, she was quite excited!)

it’s like a little color-science experiment at home. all you need are markers (we used my faaaav mr. sketch markers so i could sniff the turquoise one like a freakshow,) paper towels, and an eye-dropper. then have your little one draw small circles onto the paper towels. (you’ll probably have to hold the paper towels in place and taut as s/he draws. otherwise there could be some frustration.) then show your little one how to use the eyedropper to drop some water into the center of the circles s/he has drawn. then let the ooooo’s and aaaah’s just come…

as my friend said in her blog, this exercise is a cool way to show how to separate out the primary colors that make up a secondary color marker. (for example, the green marker will separate into blue and yellow after the water bleeds for a while.) for us, it was fun when this worked in reverse. we drew concentric circles of two primary colors, like yellow circle inside of a blue circle. then when she dropped water into the center, they blended into green.

a cat's eye?

mostly my little one was just psyched to “watch the rainbows grow!” and learning how to use a water dropper.

watch closely

and i couldn’t help but get in on the action with a little chakra aura image of my own. (gosh, i can’t wait to practice again!)

seven