Op Art Contour Hands

Sm'Arties had fun with  this lesson found on Artsonia, inspired by artist Bridget Riley.

I think most children enjoy optical illusions. These lines flow over the hands, creating the optical illusion of fluid encountering and flowing over a hand.

50 Trees

In keeping with our Science interest in Botany this year, our art lessons are often inspired by plants.  At this meeting of the Sm'Arties, we drew trees!   



Our trees were not scientific botanical drawings, but fun, stylized, realistic, abstract, themed...just a page full of TREES.

I put out skinny Sharpies and Flair pens. I found it interesting that the 2 girls jumped right in with ink, but all the boys chose to use pencils.  We looked at some printouts of  trees for a little inspiration/copycatting.  Thanks for the inspiration, artists Susan Wolsborn and Eloise Renouf! We love your trees!

She of the 50 cats with creative names also names all her trees: 

It's no surprise that Charlie Brown's tree made an appearance.

Along with a forest of great variety.

...and the next week they brought their assigned homework - draw more trees!

Faces

This project comes from Art Projects for kids' Chuck Close Portraits.

Earlier in the fall, I took head-and-shoulder snapshots of each Sm'Artie.  At home, I loaded the pictures onto picnik.com and edited them to give a black-and-white pencil sketch effect. 

We traced the portraits onto graph paper, and then colored the squares. 

The rules: no realistic colors (hair can be green and purple; it cannot be brown), use 2 consistent colors on each big section.

Sm'Arties hit the woods!

I am 2 art posts behind, but here is a little of what our homeschool mini-co-op is up to these days:

...well, when the Sm'Arties hit the woods last week, they were botanists, classifying plants with Science Geek.

...and discovering the occasional beautiful insect.

Want a closer look?

And when the field work was done, it was time to play!

Ferns Four Ways

This fall Science Geek is teaching our Sm'Arties Botany.  Most of our art projects will have a certain botanical twist, too.  Our first - depicting ferns four ways!

The day before Sm'Arties , Earthgirl and I took a little hike on the nature trail that adjoins our property, collecting ferns and mosses for the mini-co-op to study.  Science Geek did her thing, looking at vascular and nonvascular plants, then it was time for art.

We made a fern print using an ink pad, a fern rubbing using a crayon with the fern, vein side up, held under the paper, a pencil sketch, and a "magnifying glass" pencil sketch. 

Crayon rubbing

Ink stamping

Clockwise: Magnified view, crayon rubbing, ink stamping, pencil sketch

I'm looking forward to tying science and art together - it's a great school year already!

Starting again

Hurray!  The Sm'Arties are back together again!

And we get new notebooks!

Black and silver Sharpies, and permission to doodle - a pretty good first class, don't you agree?

Oh, and little metallic bead-like stickers, too - it turns out they make good frog eyes.

Final Summer Post: Last Minute Craft for Gym Camp

Note: I wrote up this post 2 months ago, mid-summer, but didn't load in the pictures until now.  The children loved the way this bookmark turned out.  I'm using my tester bookmark in our workbook for Story of the World, Volume 3.

Her voice in the message sounded kind of desperate.  She even ended the message with, "Please, please. please, please call me."  That's 4 pleases.  Well, you can't say no when someone asks you with 4 pleases - and those are just the last four.

See, that week was second week of Gymnastics camp.  We only planned to attend one day of this camp, and I only planned crafts for one day.

But Monday afternoon, our dear friend and camp-organizing coach learned that the mom doing crafts on Tuesday had an unexpected schedule conflict arise.  And Coach called and said, "please, please, please, please..."

So  I looked around and said, "Hmmm...Mod Podge, file folders, non-bleeding tissue paper squares, ribbons...BOOKMARKS!"

Now I know that we can pick up a handful of bookmarks for free every time we walk into the library, but still, it's fun to make one, isn't it?

This is a recycling craft, too - bonus!  Our background was used manila file folders.  So when one of the children said, "My folder says "Orange County DEP,"  I could say,  "It used to be a file folder for Orange County Department of Environmental Protection, but now we are recycling it!"  That idea was a hit. 

I had them trace the general shape of a bookmark onto their rectangle of paper.  Then we tore the tissue paper into shreds.

Then we got out sticky Mod Podge and brushes.  It seemed like most children prefer wet, sticky, messy art and crafts, doesn't it?  We painted on Mod Podge and laid down the tissue paper.  We painted a layer of Mod Podge over the top to give the bookmark more shine (I did this step for the "Littles" group while they took a play break.)  It was fun seeing how the different color combos came together.