Easter Art, Craft and Science Ideas

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Happy Easter, everybody!

Have you decorated you eggs yet or are you, like our family, suddenly realizing your weekend is going to be busier than you thought?! In case you are still looking for some quick and fun ideas to spice up your holidays, you’ve come to the right place. These are some of our favorite Easter ideas from the previous years that we are planning to bring back to life on Saturday! Hope you can join us.

These easy salt-and-watercolors eggs make a great Easter garland or wreath. You can also make flowers or butterflies like this. Easy, fun and kids love it. Here’s how to do it.

See how you do this. You can either use a crayon to draw on a hot hard-boiled egg and watch it melt. Or you can shred the crayon, color your egg and roll it in the shredded wax before the egg cools down too much.

I love Pisanky! And this melted-crayon above the muffin tin is as close as you can get with small kids. You still needs to be careful but it is not that difficult technique to masker. Here’s how to do it – and remember, you can always color the egg before or after you are done.

And one more idea: the ultimate Easter science project: the naked egg! See how you can make it in just a couple of days. Just make sure you make more than one because the kids will love it and will be devastated it is breaks… (at least mine were).

Northern Lights Art Project

This is now officially one of my favorite winter lessons. I created these pictures with first-graders in about 60 minutes and it went really well. We started talking about Ernst Kirchner and Expressionism. We noticed that he uses warm and cool colors and created a bold contrast in his work. So, we looked for warm and cool colors in other artists’ paintings, talked about how the colors make us feel, and what do they make us think of.

Then, I showed them pictures of the Northern Lights and we talked about how we could paint them like Expressionists – focus on our emotion rather than reality and to exaggerate the colors and sharp lines:

And of course, we had to add some animals that could see the Northern Lights (the first-graders are now talking about animals, habitats and are starting to explore the world on maps… so it tied nicely to their science lessons). We got everything: from polar bears and arctic hares to musk ox and a high-jumping killer whale.

Watercolor techniques and Penguins

Watercolors are always fun with the little ones. Especially, once you show them how to explore different watercolor techniques.

• What happens when you paint with watercolors and then dab it with a paper towel before it dries?
• What happens if you drop lemon onto the wet watercolors?
• What if you put salt on the watercolor before it dries?
• What if you crumble a plastic wrap onto the wet watercolor paper and leave it there until it dries (at least partly)?

Just make sure, the kids do not use too much. The piles of salt or the puddles of lemon juice sound like a good idea but they can destroy even the thickest watercolor paper.

If you are up to it, you can even fill the whole page with only one color, add a little painted (and cut out) penguin in a cute sweater and you have a South Pole scene that is refrigerator-worthy. Learn more in our January 2015 issue (coming out early next week).

Holiday art with lines

 

What is a line? It is a dot that went for a walk.

Today we talked about Enrico Arno, a graphic designer who created  beautiful little book – with lines only. We used it as our inspiration. We talked about different lines we could you and the different holidays we celebrate. From Christmas to Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, we had a lot of creativity going.

We learned that lines can be used to create patterns, shapes or words… and that lines can be short, long, zig-zag, curly, vertical, etc.

Then we used all of them in the art. Funny thing was that some kids seemed to color in the shapes. But as I looked closely, I noticed they did not color them in – they carefully and slowly drew lines next to each other – so close, they touched.

Aren’t these festive?

Alcohol Inks with Preschoolers

 

Have you ever tried using alcohol inks before? I love it, especially in the holiday time. It is so easy that it is an awesome project even for toddlers (if you are ok with their hands being colorful for a couple of days).

You just need some alcohol inks and a blending solution.

Then you just put a little blending solution onto the ornament (or a tile, like we did later) and start dropping the inks onto the ornament. The more blending solution you use, the more the inks will blend into each other (and the more space they will cover).

It truly is that simple!

Once it dries, it can be washed and it stays on. Just do not put anything edible on it.

We even made some coasters out of 16-cent tiles. We just glued some felt underneath and made a fun holiday-gift for kids’ teachers and parents in under 5 minutes and $1.

Try Cézanne art lessons, videos and presentations

YAY! Our new website has launched! We have worked on it for a while now and I cannot even tell you how excited I am that it is launched and done!

Anyway, I’d love to show you how it looks! And what better way to look at our magazine, video trainings and presentations than to give you free access to at least one issue.  Here it is.

It is filled with pages of art projects for kids 5-10 years old.

I chose one of my favorite issues of the magazine. I just love Paul Cézanne. Check it out, maybe you will fall for his apple paintings as well. For me, it is always about the back story…  did you know, why he painted over 200 paintings of the apples for 30 years? You will know it in a minute…

Just click this link and let me know what you think: https://artreekids.com/magazine/issues/2014/11/

Do not forget to check out the ‘see training materials’ to access videos, presentations and more.

Picasso Monsters

Happy Halloween!

We have decided to try the Picasso-inspired monsters project this year. I saw the idea flying around Pinterest a long time ago and waited for the right moment – now it’s here!

These amazing monsters, ghouls and witches were created by first graders (with no help at all).

I put together a short presentation, if anybody wants to use it. It is one spooky lesson about Pablo Picasso, organic and geometric shapes and faces. Here is the link:

http://1drv.ms/1x9Dmny

It was really a fun lesson and kids were so proud of their creations. They loved seeing what others came up with… from witches, cyclops and scary pirates and zombies to Egyptians, from teeth with cavities to eye patches and curly tongues… and from short hair to horns and loooong and pointy witches hats.

And impressionism was born!

I just came across an interesting article for kids. Do you know when an Impressionist movement started?  Now, you can find out precisely when: a Texas physicist has figured out down to the the exact minute when the Impressionism art movement was born. By his calculations, it began Nov. 13, 1872, right around 7:35 a.m. local time!

Read the article here and share it with the kids. It’s a fun way to connect the common core and art once again!

Fore more art projects about Impressionists and Claude Monet, look up the May issue of arTree (5/2014).

Dream with Marc Chagall

 

September issue fo arTree magazine is dedicated to one of my favorite artists: Marc Chagall. I loved his dreamy images ever since I was little and fell for his art once more when I saw his original paintings in NYC. The soft colors, wild perspective and surrealist scenes have always fascinated me… and now, I’d like to share it with you, your kids, students and friends.

In the latest arTree issue you can discover Expressionism, monochromatic colors and the art of Marc Chagall. You get to fly over your city, play violin with goats and ride on a rooster! You can decorate your windows with stained glass just like Daniel Maher and catch your bad dreams! Bake stained-glass cookies and draw a window to your imagination.
If you want to join the adventure, click here to subscribe. If you subscribe by the end of September, you receive 12 issues of arTree for no additional cost.

Learn more about Marc

Click here to listen to a book ‘Dreamer in a Village.’

Looking for more art ideas? Click here to get started!

Picasso’s Head

Ever since I heard about the wire + stocking sculpture, I wanted to try it – what what better way to introduce this unique medium than combining it with self-portrait lesson dedicated to Pablo Picasso. These statues are pretty simple to make (especially for grades 2 and up) but they take a long time to dry. I used acrylic paint and still needed several coats. I’d recommend doing this if you have enough time to let it dry for couple of days before decorating it. Other than that – super fun way to introduce form, discussion about face, proportions and Cubism!

If you want to see more ideas about Cubism, Pablo Picasso and self-portraits, click here.