Winter Villages

I can't believe I have not posted since Thanksgiving. I have been so busy and have quite a few projects to share with you this week.

This little collage project is a lot of fun and I know you will enjoy making it. I had a wonderful opportunity this past week that I really enjoyed. Allied Arts brought me on board for a really fun pay it forward type of project. I got to go into a few OKC schools and hand out art sets, talk about being an artist and teach art projects to 1st, 3rd and 5th graders at a few different schools.

They were so excited to have their very own art set to take home and experiment with. These kids made a big impact on me. I saw so much creativity and talent. It was a lot of fun!

So, back to this little winter scene...

This project was done by 1st graders. Each child was given a 12x12 black piece of cardstock and a 12x9 piece of white cardstock. (The white piece has to be a bit smaller so after the pieces are cut, a gap will be left to make the street.) A pile of scrap paper in different colors was set in the middle of the tables. To start I asked the children to hold up their white paper "the long way." This is important because the wavy line that makes the road needed to be cut "the long way." I told the children to make one long cut across their paper. This cut could be wavy or whatever!

After the road was created by cutting and gluing the white paper, the real magic happened. I gave little instruction. I told them to cut shapes to create a winter village. Houses could be squares, rectangles...roofs could be triangles etc. We discussed the elements on a house; doors, windows, chimneys etc.

At this point I set them free and wow. They created some really amazing things!

You will need:

-Black cardstock
-White cardstock
-Colored cardstock
-Glue sticks
-Scissors
-Foam snowflake stickers optional

Happy Thanksgiving!

Gobble Gobble!

Happy Thanksgiving! I had a wonderful time at the OKCMOA's Tiny Tuesday program this month sharing my fun turkey project with children ages 2-5.

Each child began with a piece of orange tag board. Then they went through the assembly line to get all the pieces.







I pre-cut the turkey body, heads and feathers. The idea with the turkey was to match the color of our turkey paper with the color of our embellishments. For example, kids glued yellow pom poms, real feathers, buttons and jewels on the yellow paper feather.

First we glued our turkey bodies on our paper.



Then we glued our feather and legs and began to add our embellishments. Then they could add crayon to really customize their turkeys.

Even my boys got to come with me since they were out of school. They were great helpers!



Everyone had a lot of fun with this color matching turkey adventure! Here are some of our finished pieces. Happy Thanksgiving!

You will need:
-card stock in variety of colors
-scissors
-glue
-feathers, beans, beads, pom poms, jewels, sequins, buttons and more.
-glue stick
-elmer's glue
-crayons

Feedback Fridays

Well, here it is. The first installation of Feedback Fridays. The idea was to call out my two favorite projects I saw during the week along with the site that sent me the most traffic. That is a bit tricky because it does not mean that they featured me or anything like that. They might just link to me-however, it still gets you come my way, so thank you! I think it's good for everyone, don't you? We're all connected here in blogosphere and I am all for supporting each other.

So.

The site that sent me the most traffic this week is

drumroll...

The Artful Parent. Thanks Jean! :)

I saw a lot of great projects this week and my favorite two are below.

This beautiful Starry Night Collage. Spectacular!

Find it at Art with Mrs. Smith

The second project I fell in love with was...

Autumn Paintings! Glorious!
Find this project at MN Art Gal

I hope you will go give these project some love. I love them and am sure you will too!

Have a creative weekend!

Falling Leaves

Fall into fall with this fun project for toddlers. This morning I had a great group of kids at the OKCMOA ages 15 months-3years. We gathered around and talked about changing leaves. We looked at autumn trees in a book and read a story. We learned leaves come in many colors and shapes. In the gallery our magic color was red.



Each workstation was set up with white paper and tree trunks. I pre-cut the trunks. They are simple...big Y's. Each little student used a glue stick to apply their trees.



For a fun way to give our leaves different shapes we used foam stamps. These are the sticker kind and I put them on the end of a glue stick to make it easy for little hands to stamp. If I had though of it earlier I would have cut small wood blocks. Oh well, another day!






I gave the kids one color at a time. First we used green. stamp, stamp, stamp!



Then yellow, orange, red and brown. Some of us even got our hands involved! Great fun today. Happy fall!

For this project you will need:
-white paper
-brown construction paper
-scissors
-foam shapes with sticker back
-glue sticks
-object for foam stickers (ie, glue stick, block, corks)

Fabulous Frescoes

To paint fresco means to paint on fresh, moist plaster with pigments dissolved in water. I changed it up a bit for many reasons. The biggest reason I found is that little kids will push a paintbrush right through wet plaster. So, we painted on mostly dry plaster with tempera paints. They turned out great!

There are many brands of plaster. I got a big bucket at Michael's. Check the ratio. Mine was about 2 cups plaster to one cup water. Mix, mix, mix! I poured the plaster into these red plastic solo plates that I found at walmart. They were pretty deep and in a nice shape. Give them a few taps to remove air bubbles.

You can see this painted fresco in the plate here.



This plate also made it easy for the fresco to pop out of when completely dry. It begins to harden right away setting up pretty good in 15 minutes and hard in 30 minutes depending on several factors. I would say leave them in molds for at least 4 hours to be completely hard.

We were trying to focus on Venice using the new exhibition as inspiration, but sometimes we just want to paint what we want! :) Here are some of our wonderful creations made at Drop in Art by children of all ages.

You will need:
-plaster of paris, water, measuring cup, disposable mixing bowls and disposable mixing utensils.
-solo plates
-paintbrushes
-tempera paints

This one is popped out of mold: