Rainy Day Bubble Paintings!

   

     What better way to spend a rainy day but in the throes of carefree creativity?  While I was napping away in the next room, my husband and daughter were creating a lovely collection of bubble paintings! 

     To create these beautiful masterpieces, all you need is some paint (acrylic works well), bubble solution, bubble blowers, and lots of paper.  Simply mix a dab of paint in with your bubble solution, stir, and you are ready to go!  I do however, recommend wearing a smock.  Painted bubbles can land anywhere.  Although, these pretty bubble pictures were made inside, outside is really the best place to create your masterpieces.  

     Sometimes, we make our bubble pictures on good quality paper, and cut them into note cards or gift tags.  They are always a big hit!  

Give it a try! 

Each piece is a very unique piece of work.  No two are ever the same!

It's A New School Year!

Well, today kicked off our 2012-2013 school year!  Time to buckle down and get things done.  I tried to sweeten the fact that summer vacation is over by beginning their day with some yummy chocolate chip pancakes.... displaying their new school grade of course!!

Happy 2012 - 2013 school year everyone!

The Cutest Easter Eggs Ever!!

My daughter and I found these super cute printables to make excellent Easter eggs!!

Check out Mr. Printables website. Great stuff!!

Easter Crafts for Kids | Egg People | Mr Printables

Crazy, Sticky Condensed Milk Painting

So lately, I have become pretty addicted to Pinterest. I love that I can find loads of great ideas all in one place. Recently, I ran across this very creative idea for homemade paint. The recipe is quite simple - sweetened condensed milk and food coloring. I quickly picked up the ingredients from the grocery store and the experiment began. Now, I have a daughter who is up for anything creatively, so I knew this would be right up her alley.

Upon opening the condensed milk, I became somewhat skeptical. The milk was beige in color and extremely sticky. I wondered if I would be able to make pretty colors with this sticky, mess. I scooped out a bit of the condensed milk into a small bowl, added a bit of food coloring, and WOW! the color was bright and ready to go. We immediately mixed a variety of colors and prepared to create!

Painting with the milk paint proved to be a great time. My daughter & I loved the way the thick, sticky paint felt dragging across the paper. The colors were vibrant and very glossy.

I highly recommend giving this unusual paint recipe a try. It was a fun experiment that created some beautiful pictures! The only downside? The pictures are quite sticky and take a few days to dry.

Check out these fab Condensed Milk Paintings! I love the way they shine. Thanks for the great idea Pinterest!

Our World as Pizza!

Only in homeschooling would you make a pizza to help you learn about the different layers of the Earth! That's exactly where our science lesson led us today. We used our dough to represent the crust of the earth, shredded mozzarella to represent the mantle, shredded cheddar stood in for the outer core, and a small circle of ham was our hot inner core. It was so much fun and very yummy as well!
Thanks to R.E.A.L. Science Odyssey Earth & Science Curriculum for this great idea.

A Touch of Impressionism

Recently, Youth Art Month, which is in March, inspired me to add art history to our homeschool daily schedule. Our most recent lesson was on Impressionism. Impressionism is one of my favorite art styles to teach to kids. The bright colors and blurry images that are attributed to this style are easy and fun for kids to create. Gone is the stress of getting all the details of a face perfect. Fuzzy, unfocused images are perfect for Impressionist style paintings!

Impressionism is a style that began in France in the 19th century. It is a style in which the artist captures the image of an object as someone would see it if they just caught a glimpse of it. They paint the pictures with a lot of color and most of their pictures are outdoor scenes. Their pictures are very bright and vibrant. The artists like to capture their images without detail but with bold colors.

For my lesson, I chose to focus on the art of Monet. We looked at many of his images including the painting Jardin a Giverny.

Monet's - Jardin a Giverny

This particular Impressionism project for kids is a collage and painting combo. I found the idea at Edhelper.com. Edhelper is a subscription site, but as a homeschooling mom, I find myself using this site almost daily. If you are a subscriber, you can find the lesson under Major Art Movements (Art Styles) - Impressionism.

This lesson begins with 9" x 12" pieces of blue, purple, and green construction paper. Tear the top off the purple sheet in a jagged way as to look like the bumpy edge of mountains. Glue the purple sheet on top of the blue sheet, lining up the bottom straight edges. Next, tear the green sheet in half to create the edge of the ground. Glue the green sheet onto the purple, lining it up to the straight bottom edge.

Prepare a paint palatte (I use styrofoam plates) for the student with the primary colors (red, yellow, and blue) and white. Secondary colors (purple, orange, and green) can be mixed from their primary colors. White can be added to make tints, or lighter versions of their colors.

Once the colors have been prepared, the kids can paint clouds in the sky, ridges along the montains, flowers, and grass. Remind them that the details are fuzzy and unfocused, but bold and bright.

The results are colorful and fun Impressionism inspired mixed-media creations!

My kids enjoyed this project. Even my son, who is typically a non-painter, participated in this one.

Spring is a terrific time to give Impressionism a try. The nice weather provides a great opportunity to create art "en plein air" or "in the open air" as many of the Impressionists did so frequently. Grab your art supplies and head outdoors! That would be creating art in true Impressionistic style!

We Love Our Homeschool Cooking Class!

My daughter loves all things creative. She has been asking me to add cooking and sewing to her homeschool day for a while now, so we decided to give it a try!

Halloween sugar cookies were our first project.

Mixing the dough....

Using our Halloween cookie cutters.......then off to the oven the cookies go!

Decorating the cookies with icing......and tasting them.........

And voila! Finished Halloween sugar cookies. Surprisingly, they actually tasted great!

Not sure what we'll make next. Thinking possibly muffins......

Turn Yourself Into a Comic Icon!

Check out my husband's latest portrait style. Taaaa Daaaa................. It's "COMIC STYLE" !

This portrait style is perfect for all social media needs! Facebook pics, twitter, blog profile pics- anytime you want to give yourself a little pizazz!

The portraits can be ordered for $25.00 from his website - www.cpbstudios.com

What do ya think?

Georgia O'Keefe Creations

Student Work

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) was an American abstract painter born in Wisconsin. She attended the Art Institute of Chicago, the Art Student's League in New York, and Colombia Teacher's College in New York. She was an art teacher before she became a full time artist. She was a leader in the development of the American Modernism Movement. O'Keeffe painted still lifes, massive flowers, the New York at Night series, southwestern landscapes and stark bones found in the desert. In 1939, she was selected as one of the twelve most outstanding women of the past fifty years by the New York World's Fair Committee. Her painting, Sunset-Long Island, was chosen to represent New York in an exhibition of the art of the United States at the World's Fair. In 1985, O'Keeffe was granted the Medal of Arts by President Ronald Reagan.

Red Poppy by Georgia O'Keefe

Pelvis With Distance by Georgia O'Keefe

In this lesson, students will be painting flowers or skulls in the style of O'Keefe. This can be accomplished quite easily by following these simple steps.

1. Find a picture of a flower or skull that you would like to paint. I usually find my samples on the internet.

2. Draw the flower or skull on your paper with a pencil. Draw it so large that it runs off the page. There should not be any empty background. The flower or skull should take up all of the paper.

3. Using paint, color the picture. Quite often, O'Keefe's paintings have either a warm or a cool feel. This can be accomplished by either using all warm colors (red, orange, and yellow), or all cool colors (blue, purple, and green.)

This picture below is being painted with cool colors.

This student has printed out pictures of flowers to use as a reference.

Here are some of our finished pictures! One warm and one cool - can you figure out which is which?

Good Luck with your O'Keefe creations! I know they will be beautiful - with such pretty subject matter and vivid colors they always are!

Discover Pointallism with Georges Seurat

Georges Seurat was a French Post Impressionist painter that lived from 1859-1891. He is best known for his development of pointillism and his use of optical mixing. Here is a great biography sheet on Seurat - http://makingartfun.com/pdf/seurat-printit-biography.pdf . One of his most popular paintings is entitled "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte." View this painting here - grande-jatte.jpg 750×501 pixels. Pointillism is a technique of painting in which small, distinct dots of pure color are applied in patterns to form an image. In this art lesson, students are going to create their own pointillism picture using optical mixing. Optical color mixing is created through our perception of color. When one looks at two small amounts of different colors laid down side by side the two appear to create a different color. For this project, I gave the students the three primary colors - red, yellow, and blue. By putting two different primary color dots side by side, the viewer's eyes will blend the colors and see a new secondary color (purple, orange, or green.) This is a great time to review how to make secondary colors from primary colors. This link will take you to a great page on color mixing - Color Mixing - Enchanted Learning Software . After a quick lesson on Seurat and color mixing, the kids began their paintings. They followed these simple steps -

1. Sketch the picture to be painted with a pencil to provide some guidelines. Keep the design simple - no small details.

2. Using dots, paint the picture using optical mixing to create secondary colors. The dots must be close together to mix properly.

3. The pictures are finished! Have someone hold your picture for you, step back a bit and let your eyes do the optical mixing! Do you see the secondary colors?

4. Show your beautiful art to your friends and family. Teach them about Seurat, pointillism, and optical mixing. Find a special spot for your new picture in your home and enjoy!

Self-Guided Art Projects

Every now and then, my daughter secretly digs through my art cabinet and drags out a bunch of random supplies. I usually find her on the floor or at the table creating her own masterpiece, free from direction or expectations. These are the art projects she loves the most. They are totally her own, from the selection of the supplies to the execution of the composition. Quite often, she will sit for a long time playing with her creation. They are often cities, or houses, or as the case this time, a baby's nursery.

My daughter's self-guided art moments remind me to let go sometimes and let her be in control of her own creations, from start to finish - no directions and no expectations.

Give it a try sometime - set out a variety of arts & crafts supplies for your child and then just let them be. See what they come up with. I guarantee it will be a creative masterpiece!

Fantastic Friday with the Arts - Tissue Paper Forsythia

While perusing my favorite blogs recently, I came across a must do art activity. Pink and Green Mama posted a fantastic art project using paint and tissue paper to recreate the flowering plant, Forsythia. I love to see Forsythia in the spring, and the thought of a classroom full of painted Forsythia sounded exciting! I decided to have my small art class give this project a try. We followed the directions listed on Pink and Green Mama's blog. Here is a link to the activity on her blog - Pink and Green Mama: Easy Kid Spring Art Craft: Tissue Paper Forsythia

1. The kids used a straw to blow very watered down tempera paint into the shape of Forsythia branches.

2. Next, they painted small green leaves around the branches.

3. Then the kids glued on crinkled pieces of yellow tissue paper to represent the Forsythia blooms.

4. Voila!! The finished Forsythia plants! Hang these in your home and it can look like springtime all year round!

Thanks Pink and Green Mama for the wonderful and fun Forsythia activity!!

Fantastic Friday with the Arts - Joan Miro

Joan Miro was a Spanish artist who developed a very whimsical style back in the 1930’s. His painting called “People and Dog in Sun” is a fun one to imitate by drawing stick figures and stars.

1. Give each student a 9" x 12" piece of watercolor paper and pencil. They are to draw one large stick figure in the middle, preferably in some action pose. Miro often repeated shapes in his work so ask the students to add more shapes to their art but ONLY by using lines and dots. At least two of the shapes need to intersect (overlap) to make more shapes to color.

2. After the pencil drawing is done, the students need to trace it heavily with a black crayon.

3. Have the students fill in all the shapes they have made with a different color.

Have a super time creating your own Miro's! Check back next week for a new lesson based on a different artist. See you then!

Fantastic Friday with the Arts - Japanese Folding Screens

Japanese artists make the loveliest folding screens, carved with designs and painted black. Some are made from wood frames and have hand-painted silk stretched in each panel. The paintings are often of flowers or landscapes. The Japanese also have a love for things that are very small, so miniature table top screens are a popular decoration. This week my art class made their own miniature paper folding screens to hold their favorite photos.

For this project, I asked each child to bring in four photos that they would like to have on their screen. I also had magazines on hand the day of the lesson for those kids who forgot to bring in their photos. Those kids were able to cut out pictures from the magazines to use on their screen.

The first step in this project is to fold construction paper to make their screens. Each child needs 2 pieces of 9"x12" paper. Both papers need to be folded in fourths in a fan type of fold. On one of the pieces, cut a small photo window at the top of each folded section. I did this step for the kids with an exacto knife. Next, tape one photo behind each photo window. Glue the second 9"x12"piece of paper to the back of the first to create the backside of the screen and to give the screen strength.

It is now time to paint the designs. We used black watercolor paint to simulate the black india ink that would be used by real Japanese screen artists. Black marker could be used as well. I printed out pictures of flowers for the kids to look at for ideas.

I also printed out some simple Japanese words in case they wanted to put some Japanese writing on their screen. They really seemed to enjoy painting the real Japanese characters.

This lessons is also a great time to teach the kids about the art of calligraphic line painting. Based on oriental calligraphy or "beautiful writing," calligraphic line is characterized by variations of line width and the power of a simple line to convey a complex feeling. I encouraged the students to use black ink with various sizes of brushes and sticks, practice making marks with different widths, directions and pressure.

Here is a finished miniature folding screen. This will make a terrific table decoration!

The kids seemed to really enjoy this project. They liked exploring the art of a different culture, and anytime they can include photos of their loved ones in an art project, it is a big hit!