Future Plans

Xiera: "Mommy, I already know what I want to be when I grow up."

Me: "Really, what is that?"

Xiera: "An Artist!"

Exploring Our Senses of Sight and Touch...

The girls enjoyed themselves this morning while attending their art class at the Troy Hayner Cultural Center. The class focused on different painting techniques besides the normal paint brush. The first project they created were pussy willow trees.

They dipped textured strings of yarn into paint and then pressed them onto paper. They then used their fingers starting with their larger fingers, (thumbs) along the bottom of the pussy willow tree first. Then working their way up the tree they used their index fingers and so on and so forth until they reached the top branches which required their pinkies to make the tiny pussy willow blossoms.

Their next project was painting landscape compositions. They picked out their favorite landscape picture and then painted what they saw. This time they were able to use paint brushes and fingers. They also learned about color mixing to create different shades of colors.
Xiera found a new technique to create texture to her painting by turning the brush upside down and using it to add detail. She used this technique to create bricks and grass strokes.

Zella preferred using only the paint brush for this project and used many different sized brushes to create her vision.

It is really amazing to see what they create. A child's vision is truly a beautiful thing. They are looking forward to the next upcoming art class where they will be creating handmade Christmas ornaments. It sounds like lots of fun and what is even more exciting is that mommy doesn't have to clean up the mess. ;)

Painting With Yarn

Today Zella wanted to paint so I brought out my inner preschool teacher and got a little creative. Instead of the regular paint brushes to paint with, why not use pieces of scrap yarn? (Which I have lots of!)

Materials we used were...

construction paper
yarn scraps
wooden clothes pins
washable paint
paper plate

First I placed small amounts of paint in a variety of colors onto a paper plate. You can also use a regular plate. I just wanted clean up time to be as easy and fast as possible. Then I attached small pieces of yarn onto wooden clothes pins and dipped them into each color of yarn. Zella then picked out a piece of construction paper and we were ready to paint. She dragged the string along the paper like a worm and laid it in different ways to create different designs. It was a lot of fun. We also used texture yarn for a different design effect.

It turned out really neat!