paint cut paste

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.

did you see the artful parent’s 10 simple art activites post this week? [it was jean-ius! if not, you should take a peek - she even offers a printable sheet of ideas to post in your art space as reminders.] it totally inspired me to bust out some q-tips and paint and introduce N to the idea of pointillism!

first, we had a little art lesson from my favorite art history texts (good ol’ gardner and janson) and perused some seurat images.

then i put out a limited palette – magenta, orange, yellow, and cyan. (magenta, yellow, and cyan are the CMYK model of primary colors for ink printing, so they can create most colors when layered.) and our tool: q-tips.

N was excited about this from the beginning and went to work making a starry night sky and moon, and then a car driving on the road.

then she asked for her markers because she wanted to try pointillism with those. good thinking! so she created a beach scene.

this is the piece where N invented "dash-illism" because "dashes are easier"

N has just begun her next marker pointillism masterpiece… i have a feeling she’ll be working on this one a while.

momma got in on the action, too — i found it quite meditative!

try pointillism with q-tips, paintbrushes, markers, eraser tips of pencils, or do-a-dot markers.

what do you dot dot dot with?

N has been in a particularly creative mood these past few days, as she has been sick and mildly feverish. she does some of her best imagining in that somewhat warm-brained altered state. today i found a stash of old construction paper wedged between some files, and N and i decided to break out the acrylics and make some paintblots.

i suppose this is similar to rorschach’s inkblot test – or at least the images look that way. i just want to note here, for the record, that rorschach’s name was in no way mentioned in my three years of graduate level art therapy training, so i wasn’t doing this as an art assessment whatsoever. just playing with paint and paper and N’s imagination!

she had lots of fun choosing paper and paint colors and squeezing the paint onto the paper.

then folding, patting, pushing, squishing the paint around in between the fold.

and opening the papers back up to reveal the surprise of a design! “i love not knowing what it will look like!” she said, as she opened fold after fold.

she did some simple ones using one color.

"blue butterfly"

N also explored using several colors with two different techniques: 1) all at once and then fold and 2) folding between each color.

"an angel with a big heart"

they revealed some really amazing images, and i loved hearing about what they each looked like to N.

in her words, (L to R, top to bottom) they are:

1. fire breaking into a nest of yellow eggs
2. janice (from electric mayhem) with big colorful eyes and big lips
3. an angel with a big heart
4. a fox face
5. two bunnies giving each other eggs
6. a baby
7. a butterfly
8. the ocean
9. ribs or bones (looks like hip bones to me!)
10. a turkey about to clap
11. blue butterfly
12. someone saying “mmmmm”

this is an easy and fabulously fun way to spark creativity! while paint is wet, you can add sequins or glitter. and after the paintblots are dry, it would be fun to embellish the images or scene with crayons or markers. these would make excellent t-shirts! maybe next time we’ll do this with fabric paints…

what would you do with a series of paintblots?

last week, we did a little holiday baking around here. we made our usual recipe-off-the-marshmallow-fluff-jar fudge. then i had to dig up a new sugar cookie recipe because of the whole pesky gluten-intolerance thing. i ended up finding an awesome recipe that you honestly would not know is gluten-free! we got down to business, mixing the 6,502 types of flours together.

we had an awesome time cutting the cookies…

and decorating the cookies.

and admiring the cookies and eventually eating the cookies! (and gifting some)

the next day when N was playing alone in her room, she asked for scissors and paper. i knew she was coloring, and she was being sort of sneaky about it, but we granted her the items (regardless of my fear that she will someday soon attempt to cut her own hair.) after almost an hour of total quiet in there, she emerged with “cookies!”

she had been cutting and decorating lots of “cookies” on her own, and was quite proud of them. i just love child-originated art projects!

(angry gingerman shown for scale? or just because we were about to munch on him... which is probably why he was angry)