paint cut paste

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?)

who knew that when N found the regular old pencil i put in her colored pencil cup, a new favorite medium would be born?

she’s been keeping it simple over here for a coupla days now… just doing basic line drawings with a pencil and some scrap paper i keep in a bin on her art desk.

while N draws, she always narrates what is going on in the picture and what the characters are saying, in different voices and such.it’s fascinating to watch.

i will share a few (of the stack that’s collecting) of her little scenes – so fun!

festival with bounce-house, daddy with cotton candy, N with balloons, and mommy with her camera (what else would i have?)

walrus jumping rope while a bird brings her (easter) eggs to a nest

N feeding our cats their dinner bowls, but the cats are mad (see wagging tail) because a yeti has caught a person in a lasso

L to R: bird with a present, ant, spider climbing tree trunk to his web, bee, butterfly, flowers

she even made a little birthday card for our cat, bean, who turned 9 on sunday… just one day before N turned 3.5 years old this past monday, the 26th – (yes, those half-birthdays are a big deal, right?)

she wrote the message and drew a picture of herself playing with bean with the laser cat toy

the other night she began to add some color to a few line drawings she did, using her crayons. i am really into this artistic development going on over here!

our cat, bean, giving iridessa (the light-talent fairy) a rainbow tube

so for this one, i’m willing to bet you’ve got all the materials you need!

you spin me right round, baby right round… what a flashback i had today to my own childhood artistic joys. i remember being at a carnival when i was probably around N’s age and discovering the joys of spin art!

we received this alex fantastic spinner as a gift a while back, and i just pulled it out for the first time today. this is a great set – it comes with the hand-powered (kid-powered!) spinner machine, papers, cards, and red, yellow, green, and blue paint in squirty tubes.

i realize that this could totally be a great DIY activity, deeming the product absolutely unnecessary, and i say go for it if you’re a person who has a salad spinner to spare, some empty squirty bottles, and some tempra or acrylic paints (that you may want to water down a bit.) but i am not a person with a spare salad spinner (or even a salad spinner at all) unfortunately. therefore, this was a fun gift to receive for myself N.

we both had a great time! mostly, i hand-powered the machine while she squirted the paint wherever she wanted…. though we took turns a couple of times where she powered the spinner and i squirted the colors.

there were many little ooooohs and aaaaahs each time the spinner stopped and N saw her creation.

each of them lovely bursting rainbows!

what a perfect thing to do on these sunny summer days – make your own nature photos with sun art paper!

on saturday, N had a friend over to play. i tasked them with finding interesting looking natural objects in our backyard. they mostly gathered leaves and flowers.

then we went into the shade and pulled out a couple sheets of our sun art paper. (i bought three sizes of it from amazon over the winter, when i was daydreaming of sunny days ahead. this time we used the 5″x7″ paper.) we arranged the leaves and flowers on the paper before going into the sun.

next we put a clear acrylic sheet (comes with the paper) over the objects. this holds down your things so they don’t blow away in the wind or move around while exposure is happening. each sun art paper kit comes with just one, but if you want to do more than one at a time, raid your picture frame stash (especially the cheap plastic ones) and borrow some more from those. we left the paper in the sun for just 3-5 minutes (until it turns a very light blue.)

next we put the papers into a tub of water for one minute. because we wanted out images to turn out a deeper shade of blue, i added a few drops of lemon juice to the water (like it said to on the package.)

we repeated the process with more leaves and flowers… and some bubble wands, too!

after the prints have soaked for a minute, let them dry on a towel. (once completely dry, you can press them in a book for a day or so to make sure they are flat.)

the girls had fun watching how their pictures turned out, but mostly they were psyched just to run around with their popsicles. (perhaps the reason the package of sun art paper says for ages 6+)

these beautiful natural prints would make lovely cards, but i think i will frame this batch in a series to display in our home.