Last week was Abigail’s 2nd birthday and thanks to the incredible generosity of Abby’s friends we are now well stocked on art supplies. Other than crayons and construction paper, we previously had a surprising dearth of toddler appropriate art supplies, so this week is a great time to explore the world of colors and various art materials with the kids. Not that I could talk them out of this anyway because the second that fingerpaint entered our house, the kids have been going nuts to paint something.
I don’t think that I’ve ever talked to the kids about the principles of art before, so this is a great opportunity to do so. As art is not really one of my strengths, I start by googling “the principles of art” to see where in the world to start. Apparently in order to formally appreciate a work of art, you need to examine:
o The Movement – how your eye moves around the piece
o The Unity – the arrangement of items to create a feeling of completeness
o The Harmony – the similarity of the elements
o The Variety – the contrast in size and color
o The Balance – the arrangement into symmetrical, asymmetrical, or radial
o The Emphasis or Use of Contrast – what draws your eye
o The Proportion – the size and quantity of the elements
o The Pattern or Rhythm - the repetition of colors or lines
And all this time I’ve been evaluating art based on “gut feeling” which didn’t even make the list.
Since all of that is way too much info for the kiddies, I decide to focus on teaching them to understand the variety by delving more into the subtleties of color and really looking at the sizes of objects in artwork around us.
FIRST GOAL: COLOR UNDERSTANDING
First Medium: Fingerpaint
I prep the kids only by saying that we are going to try to make other colors with red, blue, and yellow because, in this case, I think that the lesson will stick with them better if they are allowed to discover it themselves. I set up the double-sided easel in the backyard with a large piece of blank paper (another awesome gift!) on each side for each girl. I tell the girls to mix two colors at a time and see what happens.
Briana’s favorite color is orange so she is anxious to make orange. I tell her to try mixing red with yellow and blue and seeing which one makes orange. She quickly gets into mixing all of the colors and seeing what happens. We talk about the red and yellow making orange, the red and blue making purple, and the yellow and blue making green (Ziploc drove that one home, didn’t they?).
Abigail is mostly enjoying squishing the paint in her fingers and making a picture too. Although she’s not articulating it, I think Abby is noticing that the colors are mixing and producing new colors. Just look at the concentration:
Second Medium: Crayons and Markers
The next day I went out while the kids were at school and got a plastic shelving thing to organize all of our new art supplies. I love organizing gadgets. As soon as the kids see it and help me stock it, I know we’re going to have to have some more art time. We get out markers and crayons and try mixing a lot of colors to see what it makes. The nice thing about our 64 color crayon box is that we can find a crayon to compare our new color creation to so that we would have the new color’s name. We talk about what colors we mixed to make, for example, wisteria and then we talk about how wisteria is in the purple family so it is made by picking the right shade of red and the right shade of blue.
There’s also a color quizzer game on the crayola site:
It was a little too detailed for the kids, but they love to get to punch buttons on my computer.
Third Medium: Sidewalk Paint
Sidewalk chalk was around when I was a kid, but did you know that there’s sidewalk fingerpaint too? One of Abby’s friends did and now we do too. In case you’re wondering, it cleans up really quickly. I got the paint off of the kids, even their hair, more easily than I can usually get dinner off of them. Even the paintbrushes and paint rollers cleaned right up! I chose a rainy day, during a downtime in the rain, to paint outside so Mother Nature cleaned that up for me.
By now, the third day of talking about colors and color creating, the kids had it down, especially Briana. So I expanded on color mixing for them by telling them that there is a color wheel and there are 3 primary colors: red, blue, and yellow. Those three can be combined to make all other colors. I pour some of each color of sidewalk paint on the driveway for each of us and show them how to make a color wheel. Everyone is very proud of their wheel, myself included. Then we enjoyed a break from the rain and chalked and painted the driveway “so it could look extra pretty for Daddy when he comes home.”
Here are our color wheel creations. Abby’s on the left, mine in the middle, and Briana’s on the right.
SECOND GOAL: PAYING ATTENTION TO RELATIVE SIZES
First Medium: Stamps
Stamps are perfect to talk about sizes, because they are a fixed size and we can vary our drawings around them. Thanks to one of Abby’s friends, we have a set of animal stamps. I draw what is supposed to be a barn and tell the kids to stamp the animals in the barn. We all look. Looks good to everyone that the multi-colored animals are stacked on top of each other all over the barn.
Then I draw a tiny barn. Briana stamps a duck on top of my barn and laughs right away. “What’s so funny, silly girl?” I ask her. “That duck is as big as the whole barn.” That’s right. When you’re drawing a picture, you have to decide if you want everything to be the real life size or not. Either way, it’s fine for your artwork, but you should think about it and then decide. We could also make a giant barn. Then what? “Lots and lots and lots of ducks can fit.” Yep. Or we could just make one big duck and that would make it a really different picture wouldn’t it?
Briana wants to draw the barn then so I teach her how to draw a barn using basic shapes. She even lets Abby stamp some animals on her barn and we talk about if they fit and we change the size of the barn. Abby also happily stamps herself a good bit and is basically covered head to toe by the time I put the stamps away. Abby, this is the closest to body art that you are ever allowed to get! By the way, I did not say that to Abby…no way I’m going to be the one to even put the concept in her head. J
Second Medium…well, kind-of: Artwork
Before we could end our week of talking about art, I wanted us to spend some time looking at real art, so before naptime I read the kids a great little book that we have (also a gift, from when Abby was first born) called ‘In the Garden with Van Gogh’. It has cute poems for many of Van Gogh’s paintings. We read through it, stopping to talk about the color and relative sizes in each of the pictures.
After naptime I point out a replica of Van Gogh’s Starry Night that we have hanging in the Princess room. Briana recognizes it from the book (we’ve read the book millions of times, we just hadn’t talked about the paintings in any detail before). We talk about the painting and I try to cover all of the things that you need to know to appreciate art, but I do so informally (ie without all of the new vocabulary). For example, I ask the kids what they think Van Gogh wanted us to look at first. Briana says the giant black house in the front. Why? Because it’s bigger than the other houses and it’s the only one that’s all black. Very observant. She intuitively gets how to really look at art better than I ever have! Abby likes the circles, I think mostly because she’s very excited about knowing some of her shapes now. We talk about how the circles and the brush strokes really give movement to the piece. I bought that replica for Matt’s apartment when we first graduated college because I thought it was so grown-up of us to have real paintings in our apartments, but I have never really looked at the painting like I did today. It was actually really interesting. I love it when the kids and I can both learn something new together!
As a quick aside, I would like to give a super shout out to everyone who got Abby all of these great art supplies for her birthday! An extra shout out goes to everyone who thought to give her smocks!!
We will definitely be doing another art appreciation activity soon because I’m intrigued myself by all that I learned about art this week! As I think of it, egg dyeing and Easter bunny cake making and decorating counts as art, doesn’t it? If so we’ll be spending the weekend engaged in lots of art projects. Happy Easter to everyone celebrating it!
<3 Pedigreed Housewife
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