paint cut paste

this rainbow carnation experiment is one i remember from my own childhood. not only is it a visually appealing activity, it’s also a great way for kids to learn the science behind water is absorbed by plants and how it travels through the different part of a flower.

the inspiration for this post was an old spice rack i had sitting in the garage. what wonderful little vials these are for this experiment! we grabbed some food coloring and white carnations (we had some in the bouquet we bought for our butterfly habitat – all of this happened a few weeks ago, i’m just late bringing it to the blogging world.)

N had fun dropping food coloring into the water, and creating her favorite color, since it was not in the cheapo food coloring pack we had – purple!

she placed a white carnation into each tiny vase, and we put them out of the way of our flower-chomping cat…

and waited. i asked N, “what do you think will happen next?” she said that maybe the flowers would grow, and that they might drink the colored water. let’s see if her hypothesis is correct…

even within a day and a half, we saw the petals taking on the colors of the water they were drinking.

ten days later, the colors were distributed throughout the different parts of the flower. we noticed that the purple color was not as saturated in the carnation as the other colors, and the darker colored waters in general seemed to be more full in the end.

there are some explanations of this experiment online that we checked out, like this one from ehow. i didn’t find any scientific reason the darker waters would not be absorbed as much. in fact, most of the write-ups i saw recommend using darker colors for more dramatic results. all in all, we had a rainbowy flowery good time with this one!

have you tried making rainbow carnations? if so, what did you notice?

“Did you hear that winter’s over?
The basil and the carnations cannot control their laughter.”

-Rumi

hooray for spring!

one of the staples of the waldorf kindergarten art curriculum is wet-on-wet watercolor painting. in N’s class, painting day happens weekly, on “rice day.” often days of the week are identified by the snack at her school, and every monday it is rice with gomashio. (i’m so addicted to gomashio -have you made this stuff?? i digress…)

N wanted to “play teacher” after a rainy school day a couple weeks ago, and decided to teach me how they do their wet-on-wet watercoloring in class. this was sort of impromptu so i didn’t set up our colorations liquid watercolors in the way i usually do, which is to put out some combination of primary colors (red, yellow, and blue… or cyan, magenta, and yellow, etc.) in baby food jars. i LOVE using baby food jars for liquid watercolors because i can put the lids back on them and save the remaining paint for another day. no wasted paint, and a good use for the zillions of jars i scored on freecycle.

on this painting day, we broke out our favorite palette of watercolor cakes and some student-grade watercolor paper. for intentional projects, we often use the heavy strathmore watercolor paper, and we also keep a large box of canson watercolor paper for N to use since she tends to blow through at least 10 sheets in a sitting, and paints often throughout the week. it’s not the toothiest, heaviest of papers, but you can’t beat $14 for 100 sheets of watercolor paper. we were all set to begin. the first thing we had to do to prepare our paper was to round the corners. all of the paper in the waldorf kindergarten has been pre-cut (by teachers) to have rounded edges.

then N showed me how to get our sheets of paper wet in the sink and how to blot them gently with a cloth before painting. she set up each of our painting areas how they do at school, and when it was time to paint, she recited the verse the teacher says as they wet their brushes to begin:

“the little bird comes down and picks up peter paintbrush, and peter paintbrush rests on the earth below. peter paintbrush dips himself into the well and dries himself off on the blue cloth and goes to play with the rainbow fairies.” 

then we painted together while N, “playing teacher,” sings the painting song her teacher quietly sings during painting time, which goes like this:

“rainbow fairies come my way. share with us your golden light today.” [repeat until your brain is numb.]

as i’ve mentioned before, all of the art in the waldorf kindergarten is marked with the child’s symbol (usually something in nature like the sun, a tree, a flower, a ladybug) instead of their name. because i did not have a symbol yet, N assigned one to me — i am the moon. i love that. so i labeled my painting as such, and included the date.

we generally paint (and make most projects) on a well-loved art board, but i saw this handmade painting board for wet-on-wet watercoloring on the waldorf homeschooling blog, and my new obsession is to make a couple of these for these peaceful times when peter paintbrush gets to play with those crazy rainbow fairies.

as we all witness within ourselves each day, emotions are fluid, flexible, and multi-layered. if you stay with any one feeling long enough, you will surely see it shift and move and change. that’s how we are built. when we look at our children, we often see emotions shifting (and totally mood-swinging) seemingly by the second.

and with good reason! if we could peek inside of the brain of a growing child and see the chemical chaos happening inside as cells are exponentially reproducing and learning is happening, we would have more appreciation (and compassion) for the fact that our child is even capable of putting one foot in front of the other to walk. i mean, it really is a wonder humans can manage all of this! there are ways of helping children to visualize something as seemingly ambiguous as their emotions — you guessed it: ART!

my husband and i are buddh-ish, and practice mindfulness meditation ourselves, so we take my daughter to a monthly meditation group for children, which she absolutely LOVES! the most recent session involved helping children to identify the quality of emotions through the metaphor of a wave. the speaker read a book to the children called my life with the wave, and talked a bit with the kids about how waves can be tiny ripples or steady crashes or huge tsunamis, and the parallel to how we sometimes feel inside.

the children were invited over to some art tables to create images of what their own personal “feeling wave” would look like in that moment, on that day.

after each child completed the art, s/he was to place it along a longer sheet of paper on the floor to add to the “ocean” of feelings in the room… made up of everyone’s individual wave.

we walked through the ocean gallery in the end to witness each person’s artful and isomorphic wave.

the parents and children gathered together on the cushions for the kids to talk about what they noticed. it was a lovely morning of being present to our feelings and expressing them through art… and, of course, the art therapist in me got all excited about that!

our kids organically live in the present moment – they are experts at it, and great teachers to us in helping us to do the same. (sometimes the shock of reeeally slowing down to BE HERE NOW is the hardest adjustment for brand new parents.) while kids’ lives exist only in the present (not in ruminating about the past or in planning for the future or multitasking,) giving children a language for their innate mindfulness provides a wonderful tool with which to understand themselves and express themselves. here are some books we’ve enjoyed with N ever since she was a wee thing:

• peaceful piggy meditation
• tibetan tales for little buddhas
• the sun in my belly
• starbright: meditations for children (moonbeam is a good one in this series, too)
• there are a couple thich nhat hahn books i’d like to get, too, like planting seeds: practicing mindfulness with children and mindful movements: exercises for well-being

do your children practice mindfulness? what sorts of tools have you found helpful with this?

after a white-chocolate-chip-and-raspberry-gluten-free-pancake breakfast a couple sundays ago, N was lured outside by the sight of her easel. still in her pjs, she requested paint (tempera) and a jacket (summer mornings are chilly in the bay area.) she got down to the business of being the artist she is.

the day before, i had the pleasure of a mom’s day out in san francisco, where three friends and i visited the SFMOMA gertrude stein exhibit and treated ourselves to lunch at cafe gratitude and crazy flavored ice creams at humphry slocombe. mmm… i digress (as ice cream makes me do.) while at the museum, i picked up a matisse post card to bring back to N since she couldn’t be with me that day. (i’ll be bringing her back to the exhibit this summer, for sure! she’d love all the matisse, picasso, cézanne, etc.)

postcard i got for N: henri matisse, femme au chapeau, 1905; oil on canvas. image from wikipedia

N said she was “so inspired by the postcard of the lady” so she wanted to paint portraits “with weird colors, like matisse did.” she asked me to be her first model. i had to sit still on a chair in our backyard while she painted me, with “weird colors.”

notice the matisse in the lower right corner

next, my pj-clad husband was asked to sit for his portrait. and he (and his coffee) happily obliged.

i love how focused she was when painting these pieces…

next, the artist asked to be the model – and she wanted me to paint her portrait. whenever i make art alongside my daughter, i do so in her “artistic handwriting,” so to speak, as a way of communicating that i am witnessing and supporting her. this also gently thwarts a child’s natural tendency to compare. (to read more on these ideas, visit a blog i wrote on how to talk to your children about art.)

after these, N made quick portraits of both of our cats, who were watching from inside the screen door. we hung these to dry on our clothesline art-drying line in the play shed, while N admired her work.

this master-in-the-making was quite proud of this exhibit!

i’ve been wanting to try this one for a while now… and we finally did! remember that plethora of stones we got from the beach recently? well, we chose a few…

and baked them and colored on them with crayons. visit our guest post all about it over on moms by heart.

it’s eric carle‘s birthday, and art bloggers all over the web have been celebrating with their children and colorful animals! we were invited by an amazing child to join the party – and we’re showing up with bells smocks on!

when i think of eric carle, i remember N’s very first baby books and how much she loved when i read the very hungry caterpillar (my all-time fav) and brown bear brown bear to her in our comfy nursing chair before sleepy time. these will always be cozy memories for me. in the past year, N has been reeeeally into foxes – it’s her most favorite animal. can you tell?

i saw the book hello, red fox in our local library and decided to grab it, as we had not read it before. what a perfect choice, as it teaches children about complementary colors in a really cool optical illusion sort of way – and we’ve been exploring color wheels over here lately. we dove right in and read/stared at the book. (if you click this link, you’ll understand why. it’s tricky – like a fox!)

then we got out a bunch of art materials for two different projects…

first, we mixed and created our own color wheel using momma’s fancy watercolors (just because) and talked about the idea of complementary colors… and why the “red” fox on the cover of eric carle’s book was green… hmm…

after that, i suggested we use some of N’s finger paintings brought home from preschool to build an animal – eric carle style! she wanted to make a fox – naturally! (hey, there’s one idea of how to repurpose and transform all of those preschool pieces of art…)

first, we talked about what shapes make up a fox, and she drew them in pencil on top of her fingerpaintings. circle, oval, triangles, rectangles…

then she cut the pieces of a fox… hooray for cutting skills! she did a great job cutting on her pencil lines.

then she pasted them onto a new sheet of paper – N chose black for the background.

after it was glued down, she used a black sharpie (supervised) to add some details to the nose and eyes. this was literally a paint cut paste experience!

what’s your favorite eric carle book, and what memories does it hold for you? have you made any eric carle art with your kiddos? if so, click below to share your own, or click to view many other bloggers’ creative takes on eric carle tribute art!

i was going through our insane collection of coloring books the other day, and i ran across one of my favorites – kids’ first mandalas.

when i opened it up, i remembered N coloring these mandalas right around her third birthday. they are so lovely!

mandala means “circle” and brings one a feeling of wholeness. they have long been used as a tool for healing and meditation, and are a part of many world wisdom traditions and religions.

once N spotted the coloring book, she wanted to work on more mandalas – naturally!

it’s an inspiring coloring book, but even more simply and creatively, you can create your own by tracing a round plate onto the page or using a compass to create a circle and let your child (or you!) create art in relation to the circle.