paint cut paste

novi was on my lap while i was at the computer yesterday. (typical.) i was doing a google search for a random rug i’m trying to find that’s been out of stock for far too long to find it. [humph.] anyway, kandinsky’s circle painting happened to come up in the search, and novi was attracted to it immediately when she saw it. “ooooh, let’s make that!” she said.

wassily kandinsky, colour study: squares with concentric circles

to begin, i used a thick, black sharpie to draw circles onto a piece of thick drawing paper (we we’re out of watercolor paper) and then i gridded them off into boxes. this gave novi some framework in which to paint, though it isn’t a necessary step. in hindsight, it would have been awesome to use watersoluble crayons (easily one of my favorite media ev-ar!!!) or watercolor pencils for these guidelines. even using pastels or crayons would be cool because they’re colorful and resist the watercolors.

i offered her pans of watercolors, matte and metallic, just for fun. i showed her how to make concentric circles with the brush, and she was off and running with it on her own. (oooh, six mandalas…)

after she finished the first piece, she wanted to draw her own circles with the sharpie and paint them in, which she did.

this one reminds me of murano glass.

while she was doing that, i drew some concentric circles with the marker on another page. after she finished painting, she said she wanted to color those with crayons.

she was so proud of the resulting pieces!

such lovely bubbles of mixed-media color – she loved our pollock painting, and here’s another masterpiece a la the late greats.

on a recent trip to colorado to visit my dear fellow art therapist friends, they reminded me of a fun little activity that i used to do when i was a little girl – scratch drawings! as a kid, i loved the magic of revealing a rainbow under a dark, black veil. i thought novi might appreciate this, too.

i thought i remembered painting thick paper with watercolor, coloring over it with thick black crayon, and scratching… but perhaps not. my art therapist friend (and momma) was doing this with her 3 year old and reminded me that you can color with crayons or pastels, and then put a thick coat of acrylic paint over the whole page to scratch through. so we gathered our materials (thick paper, crayons, acrylic black paint) and began…

novi and i both covered a page with patches of tons of colors… i got a blister from doing this!

then we painted over the entire lovely page with black acrylic paint.

we let it dry overnight. once it was dry, we got out a few scratching tools – a wooden skewer, a paperclip, a tack, and a nail. not all of them were cool for young kids, but novi seemed to do well and was careful with all of them. whew!

novi drawing with a nail. (bad mommy?)

we scratched and scratched to reveal fun pictures… “nighttime scenes!” as novi excited called them.

you know me and cutting things out and putting them on colorful papers as borders. (yeah, i did that again. maybe for cards?)

we’ve done some bead crafts before, but novi wasn’t ever as into diligently stringing beads as she was today… when my self-proclaimed beader went to WURK.

we got out our trusty alphabet beads to make a baby bracelet for a newborn friend (and a big sis bracelet for the newly-minted big sis.) we like to mix these with our mish-mashed bead collection on stretch cord to make funky trinkets as gifts.

we’ve also used these same combos to make allergy-alert bracelets – remember? novi picked out some beads she loved, and we also made her a name bracelet for herself today.

(knitted sweater a la my mom)

as i was working on the baby bracelet, i noticed that novi was rooting through the letters, and had picked out a stash of beads and was stringing them happily on the other side of the table. honestly, this wasn’t going to be a blog entry craft until i saw what was going on.

it wasn’t until i was finished with the baby bracelet that i realized what she was doing – too sweet!

customized jewelry is quite a perk of having a 3-year-old who can spell the names of her family members.

batgirl, the beader

i proudly sported my mommy bracelet all day long!

way better than silly bandz, yo!

okay, i can’t pass this one off as art, but it was so much fun that i had to share. aaaand, we checked off one of our summer activity cards today — water balloons!

someone was psyched!

we (uh, okay just me) got soaked trying to fill the water balloons with the hose, and then we had a great time with them!

the first batch

novi had a great time watering the plants with them…

and watering ME with them…

watering the grass with them…

watering the garden wall with them…

there was also some degree of self-sacrafice involved

we were sure to gather up all of the balloon pieces when we were finished so that no animals would eat them. novi gave them a new life by making little blankets out of them for her marbles (creative lady.)

happy water ballooning this summer!

i adore my iphone for many reasons, not all of them healthy. one of the more productive reasons is that it is allowing novi to begin to make digital art.

surely, in her generation, she is likely to draw with pixels of light moreso than we ever did as kids. i mean, litebrite is as close as we came to light pictures, right?

i am a fan of digital art, myself. and it’s so fun to have novi ask me if she can write and draw on my phone. we did a post on this same thing a little over a year ago, so i figured it was time to revisit this medium.

she loves picking her own colors and trying to create little scenes. the ones shown here are made my a free iphone app called scribble lite.

we also like colortilt. what are your favorite artsy iphone apps? comment (by clicking top left) to let us know! i’m always looking for a good free download.

this post is basically an ode to a material i have come to love – the crayola true to life series of dry media. no, they don’t pay me for this (but they totally should! right?! come on, someone send us some art materials to review…)

seriously, their crayons and colored pencils make the art look so cool! novi came home from preschool one day with the fish below and asked, “can we get some swirly crayons for home?” um, yeah!

so we did and she went to town in her coloring books making all sorts of rainbowy creatures.

novi says, "the bottom butterfly is sad because she's just purple."

wait, what you do mean it's not a sno-cone fight?

then she got her hands on some the true to life colored pencils, and after a trip to the local yeti museum (yep, she’s a fan) she got to work coloring a tree-hugging yeti.

the yeti is coming to life…

i mean, does this bigfoot look real or what? someone call the tabloids!