paint cut paste

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)

as of late, N’s days and evenings are filled with line drawings. she has found her “favorite pencil” (just a regular old yellow #2 pencil) and it’s pretty much her go-to art material these days.

in september, she began to crank out an impressive volume of line drawing, usually totaling 5-15 per day. she draws them at her “art desk” in the kitchen, usually while i am preparing meals. as she draws, she narrates what is happening in the picture, she does voices for the characters in the picture, and she describes each image to me in detail afterwards. this has almost replaced her magna-doodle habit.

the papers were stacking up on her desk, my desk, the dining room table, the kitchen counter… i put the date on the back bottom right corner of each one because each is just such a gem — way too precious not to keep and cherish forever. but how?!

"this cat is an artist all day & all night"

many of you have written to me asking how to store your child’s art. we display N’s art around our house in a gallery format in her bedroom and in frames around our house. we also create cards, giftwrap, and gifts out of N’s art. the rest we do store. i keep much of it in a large portfolio (read: two pieces of posterboard taped together on 3 sides) in the playroom closet. but these drawings were just coming too fast and too brilliantly to do that. so i got a cute binder at target and a 3-hole punch and created a drawing book in which to store these masterpieces chronologically.

my intention was that all of N’s drawings for the remainder of 2010 would go in here. you can see that by the title i put on the spine.

however, this book — the stack you see here in the photo below — is the product of just 22 days of drawing! (and my own sketchbook project‘s book has 3 little pages done. i think i should commission my little artist-in-residence to help me with that!)

a serious body of work for 3 weeks time!

most of them are with her trusty pencil, but a few get colored in.

cinderella & the prince

N makes all sorts of other art during the day, but no matter what, she cranks out the line drawings. she says she’s “writing a movie.” i think she’s well on her way to illustrating a cartoon, a flip book, or a children’s novel at the very least. i think i’m going to get her a spiral sketchbook next. have any of you tried that with your 3-year-olds?

how do you archive your child’s art? do you keep it all? aaaand, how do you get your kid to draw on the backs of the pages? (as green as we try to be and as much as N respects trees, loves using cloth napkins, etc., she cannot bring herself to draw on the back of her pages. suggestions?)

N 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 N 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 N 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.

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 N 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…

N 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 N seemed to do well and was careful with all of them. whew!

N drawing with a nail. (bad mommy?)

we scratched and scratched to reveal fun pictures… “nighttime scenes!” as N 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 N 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? N 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 N 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!