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 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. 

Preschool Art Lessons

In the fall, a homeschooling friend of mine began talking about doing a mini-art lesson each week with her 4 year old daughter, so we began doing just a little crafty/art time together with Ariana. 

It's evolved a little this semester, and we added another little student. I love helping little ones begin learning about simple art basics, and I thought I'd share my plans here for anyone else who'd like to play along at home! 

Last semester, we experimented a lot with color theory and mediums. We also did a lot of seasonal play! 

I got this book before Christmas and decided that during the spring semester, I would loosely follow it and we would do some veryyyyyy simple studies of the Masters. 

Last week (our first week), we talked about the colors in the rainbow and experimented with the different ways different media looks: watercolor, different tipped markers, liquid water color, acrylic paint, neocolors, and oil pastels. 

The girls made a banner that they took home, a different color & medium represented on each piece of the banner. It was cute! 

This week, we talked about the Renaissance and specifically, Leonardo Da Vinci! Before we got into all of that, though, we looked in the mirror and tried to draw our different expressions (especially paying attention to how our eyes, eyebrows, and mouth looked during each one). 

Then we watched this little video about Leonardo Da Vinci. 

After hearing about the Mona Lisa, we had to try our hands at adding hair and clothing! (This activity would be really fun to see how they did at different ages.) 

(Find this printable here)

Then we worked on self portraits, using this printable. 

Because little ones often tend to rush through an activity like this, I had them only do what I instructed them for each step instead of just free styling it. They first had to go look in the mirror and I prompted them with questions like "What shape are your eyes? Are they football shaped or circles? What color are they?" and then they would come back and just draw their eyes... and so on and so forth, so that they really took the time to look at their faces and try to draw details. I loved their results! 

 I'll continue to share our journey each week!