paint cut paste

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?

spring is one of my favorite seasons! it brings such colorful flowers and such beautiful art! in thinking about daylight savings time coming before the spring equinox this year (this sunday!), it seems like we’re all so READY for spring to arrive!

so i thought i’d publish a little round-up of some of our favorite art activities we’ve done in springs gone by…

nesting orbs – help pimp the nests of our little birdie friends

make some fancy flowerpots

create a personalized springy tote bag (great mom’s day or teacher’s gift idea!)

upcycle with paper roll flowers

get your paws into some cherry blossom prints

tiz the season to weave some beautiful strawberry basket bins

create some blooming paper!

and we’re up for sooo much more springy art this year! stay tuned!

i just had to share the sweetest card that came home from preschool with N. again, a great idea from her preschool teacher to do an upside-down handprint santa.

and what’s inside is truly heartwarming.

a picture of us all around the christmas tree

ho ho ho!

winter is upon us in a few short weeks, the winter solstice being my favorite holiday! (ahem, it is my birthday, afterall…) today N and i practiced our folding and cutting while decorating for the winter by making paper snowflakes!

we gathered up some scrap paper and both grown-up and kid scissors. if you want an idea for something to do with those watercolor paintings that come home from preschool or lovely marbled paper, this is a great transformation for that art work to have a new life.

first, i had to brush up on my origami paper folding for snowflakes. sure, you can fold it in half and in half again, but there is a more intricate way that involves a 60 degree angle. this youtube video really seemed simple and friendly enough for me (or your older children) to follow. here are some of the papers in various stages of folding…

after properly folded, we were able to cut like crazy (as he says in the video.) here is where we found that a 3 year old using her little kid scissors just might get frustrated when cutting layers upon layers of folded paper. gotta hand it to N – she tried. if you have older children, they’ll be able to do this just fine.

then she opted to cut a bunch of other things out….

…while i cut the folded snowflake paper.

blue and white preschool painting turned to snow!

N also modeled the finished snowflakes, lined them up, counted them, threw them in the air like it was snowing… lots o fun!

when we were finished, it looked like a snowstorm in our den!

we hung these paper snowflakes up on the back door. i’ll likely make more to hang from our chandelier or to string into garland — i’m such a garland addict! help!

a little golden one landed on our christmas tree

who says it doesn’t snow in the bay area?

grandma is in town and brought with her a really cool coloring set for N… metallic markers on black backgrounds with who else? the disney fairies!

nevermind that blank rectangle at the bottom where N already took the markers off.

i’m so not getting paid to endorse a product here, but i’ve always been a sucker for making art on black backgrounds, so that’s the gist of this post.

N said it was magical. something about having colors show up against a dark background is like drawing with light in a nighttime sky. she completed both images that came in this disney fairies shimmer art package.

we went out to lunch later in the day, and i thought to bring along these metallic markers from the set, along with an art journal i have with blank black pages in it. (by the way, you can get the sharpie metallic markers at target and they create the same effect.)

i drew a circle on the page and invited her to create a mandala. she LOVED this directive and really got into it.

mandala artists converse

creating this masterpiece…

for some more on creating mandalas on black paper, check out our blog from last year by clicking here.

you probably already know we like to make art out of toilet paper rolls around my house…. the recycling bin is a great place to find art materials! when i saw this project on the a glimpse inside blog, i knew we’d have to try it out. i mean, we have toilet paper rolls for days being saved over here.

first, we gathered about 5-6 or so toilet paper rolls (paper towel rolls work well, too.) you’ll also need scissors, orange paint (we used acrylic, but tempra is fine,) a hot glue gun, twine, and maybe a ruler. i flattened the cardboard tubes and cut them into sixths. (i just eyeballed it, but a ruler measuring them to a half inch might have been nice…?)

N had lots of fun painting them orange. (on the blog where i saw the idea, they painted some orange for pumpkins and some red for apples, but we opted for pumpkins only at our house. check out their apples though – different shape and also way cute!)

i painted the insides of the rolls for her, and she did the outsides

honestly, it was a hot orange mess, but i love how acrylic paint just peels right off of skin when it’s time to wash up.

after the ringlets were dry, we lined four rings up in a row, and i hot glued them together where they touched.

next, cut two other rings on one of the folds. spread one out across the top and the other out across the bottom of the four glued together rings, and glue those to the sides and onto each of the four points across top and bottom. put a glue dot on the top, and glue an unpainted (or green painted, if you please) little piece of cardboard there for a pumpkin stem.

we ended up making five of these pumpkins, but i almost chose to make four of these larger pumpkins and alternate them with single-ring tiny pumpkins (like the one i mocked up below) across the garland. i decided against it in the end, but i wanted to share that idea here incase you want to try it. if you do the tiny pumpkin, turn the stem sideways (like you see below) so that the twine can be strung through it.

these are the five pumpkins we made, before they were strung. cute, huh?

next, N helped to string the pumpkins onto some twine we had laying around. (i love that i bought nothing new for this project. my favorite kind!) when you’re ready to string yours, you just have to choose which part of the pumpkin is the front, and make sure the bulk of the string shows across the back when you thread it through. she just put it down through the top tiny triangle hole on the left side of each pumpkin, and then back up through the top tiny triangle hole on the right. easier done than said.

photo credit: my husband was home

that’s it! then you’ll have a rustic pumpkin garland that will be so cute for halloween and the duration of the autumn harvest season! we strung ours across the mantel. if you try this, let us know  – share your photos on our facebook page’s wall, as we’d love to see yours and where you’ve hung it!

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?)