Oceans & Watery Landscapes Part 1 & 2

After talking about some of the artists that liked to do ocean paintings from our Usborne Art Book

(Caspar David Friedrich and Winslow Homer are two artists we talked about,, along with just looking at some of these paintings. We loved looking at the different colors and textures Winslow Homer used in his sea pictures, and tried to guess what the weather and mood were like in his paintings.) 

Our project for the day was this one.

We started by using several shades of acrylic craft paint & glitter paint that we saw in the paintings, and painted a thick piece of white cardstock with them. We used stamps, sponges, bubble wrap, thick brushes, and dye spray... anything that would give dimension. It's important that we cover all the paper with color! 

We used watercolor paper and blue water colors for the sky. Again, covering the whole paper was important. For the sand, sponges and a couple of shades of cream, yellow, and brown on a piece of cardstock made the sand. 

We let those pieces dry... and the next time we had art lessons, it was time for part two of our project! 

First we tore our ocean pieces into strips. You have to show the kiddos how to do one long strip, otherwise they'll try to tear small pieces. Once you get them started, they can do it! It's cool to show them how tearing one way doesn't have a white edge, but tearing the other way does. 

We glued down our ocean pieces onto our blue sky watercolor paper with mod podge, then repeated the process with the sand pieces. I helped them trim off any overlap off the sides of the watercolor paper.  Next came gluing down the pieces to the little sail boat (I cut them out for them)... then the fun part! 

We took our art work outside, and I brought out a small cup with water and white acrylic paint mixed together and a large paintbrush. I showed them how to fling the paint (watch out- it gets messy) to add "water spray" to their pages. It was so fun and I think we'll have to do another modern art piece with only splatters some time soon! 

This was such a rewarding piece of work. So cute how it turned out! 

Preschool Art 5: Flowers

Georgia O'Keefe and Flowers

Preschool Art Lessons #4: Rembrandt, Vermeer, & Everyday Scenes

Will update this with the info!

Pocket Letters- this is not project life!

So... I found a new thing. 

Adding a planner, and a documented faith moleskin, and a journaling Bible were apparently not enough additional creative endeavors for me in 2015, so now I am adding this. 

Pocket Letters

This is NOT Project Life, although it looks similar. 

It is a letter. In pocket form. 

I have friends that live all over... England, Scotland, Ireland, Bundibugyo, Alaska... the list goes on. I'm often at the post office, sending off a little letter or small package here or there. 

And then I stumbled across the idea of Pocket Letters on Instagram and just HAD to do it for my friends! 

It's in a baseball card protector, that can be folded into thirds and slid into a long envelope. What do you put into the pockets? Well, all sorts of things! 

The design team is using this color board this week as inspiration for our projects, so I decided to do my first Pocket Letter using it as well. 

I am using the Shine Bright Kit since it goes with this color board so perfectly (almost like we... planned that... hehe). 

I tucked in behind the cards some old notes between my friend and I... a mini book mark...

Some tea, some cute odds & ends, and a full letter. 

Isn't this SO fun??! I'm obsessed. Come join our FB group and share with us your color board creations this week! 

My Sunshine Girl

We have had the most nasty last couple of weeks here in Alabama... lots of just cold, rainy, gray grey days. And the next week looks like more rain is coming! I normally love a rainy day but for some reason, this year, it has really affected me. 

I have some adorable sunshiney pictures of my baby girl and combined with the Shine Bright kit (a couple still available!), it has perked me right up. Colors make me happy!

I'm glad I got more of those resin flowers from Noel's shop... I used THREE on this layout!

After I made my layout, I realized- WOOPS! I made a little journaling error.

I fixed it easily by just handwriting some words to highlight and adhering down on top. Easy! 

Did you see this deal on the NoelMignon facebook page? Yeah I thought you might have missed it! 

Preschool Art Lessons Part 2: Bruegel and Cool/Warm Colors

(This is an ongoing series of casual art exploration I am going through with a few preschoolers. 

You can see my first post here.)

This week we continued to use the Usborne Children's Book of Art and do a little learning about Bruegel.

Because, understandably, as soon as they arrive, my little students want to begin getting messy, I reserve some of our "history" until later in the lesson. We started out by watching this little video about warm and cool colors (which they giggled about!).

I pulled out the liquid watercolors and we began painting our color wheel. I used some printables from  an art lesson on "Hot Dogs and Cool Cats" from TPT that you can find here.

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After mixing our paints and enjoying the process of seeing new colors come alive, we talked about how cool it is that you can divide the color wheel in half and have one side with WARM colors and the other side with COOL colors. We also talked about what colors make us feel certain things.

Then we colored our dogs with whatever choice of warm color they wanted, and our cats with whatever cool color they chose. The lesson has some other activities that could extend this activity, but today we just kept it to these. We may re-visit some of them other activities later. 

We began working on this project from Deep Space Sparkle, using warm and cool colors. The girls all colored/painted two sheets of paper: one with nothing but warm colors, the other with nothing but cool colors. 

While they were drying, we watched a little video about Bruegel and I encouraged the girls to shout out when they noticed warm colors or cool colors in his work. 

Next week, we'll finish up their warm & cool piece and begin on our next topic (Rembrandt, Veneer, and Everyday Scenes)! 

I really liked this power point and simple instructions on atmospheric perspective with Bruegel, and I had planned on us doing it too, but we just ran out of time. We will probably use it when we study Caspar Friedrich and oceans/mountains. 

This post had lots of links and good info on Pieter Bruegel, too. 

My Planner System

Click here and you can read all about my latest planner system.