Art Friday #2

We continued to explore the element of color and color mixing in art today. This time, the kids used strings as tools to create patters and mix the paint. The children each put one string saturated with red paint, one with yellow and one with blue, spreading them on half of their paper and leaving one bit sticking out the bottom. They folded them in half and put a heavy object on the paper while pulling the threads one at a time. Most of the kids exclaimed "WOW" as they opened up the paper. The results were beautiful and the process fun. A few kids may have benefited from gloves as they were a bit squeamish from touching the saturated strings, but all-in-all I think it was a good lesson.

 

Again adapted from the class on www.pinapplepaintbrush.com

 

Art Friday #1

I decided during the summer to teach a more focused art curriculum to the pre-k set this year so every Friday we do Art Class. I found this awesome blog:

http://www.pineapplepaintbrush.com/

and purchased Dani's pdf of her simple and fun Introduction to Art for Preschoolers. Our first art element is color.

I showed the preschoolers some colorful works of art by Brazilian-American artist Romero Britto. They were intrigued by his use of color, shape and subject.

www.britto.com

We talked about the primary colors: red, yellow, blue and they watched as I used my "magic" paintbrush to mix and change the colors. Of course, these kids are too smart for me and knew that the colors mix already...

We created symmetrical paintings by using only red, yellow, and blue paint, then observing how these colors mix as we used brushes or simply pressed the paper and opened it. We had a bit of over-mixing and some brown results, but most of the kids listened well to directions and tried to keep the mixing to a minimum so the colors and changes would show through. Here are some results: