paint cut paste

this one began as a simple request by my little artist in residence: “last night i was thinking about drawing a ballerina using white and peach crayons, but those colors never show up!” so i suggested that we get out different colors of paper and she could draw with any and all of the drawing tools she has.

i brought out many colors and sizes of paper i have stashed. some construction paper, some were those little packs of card stock scraps you can buy cheaply. i put her crayons, colored pencils, and oil pastels out on the table.

then she got to draw the ballerina she had imagined… and said, ”you know, if i think hard enough, i can see what i want to draw in the air before i draw it.”

another dancer came after that (which she said is an image of herself)

then she changed themes and drew a very cool picture on black paper that she titled, “night surfing”

and made an image of a chocolate ice cream cone as a gift for our friends.

so as simple as this blog entry is, it is merely a reminder that it’s fun to switch it up sometimes and bust out all sorts of papers to draw on… it inspires kids’ imaginations in different ways and new images arise. try it out and see what emerges…

the other day i decided to bust out the pastels on N… 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 N’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!)

N 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.