A fantastic hour with minis. Houses, trees and the weather. They loved it!
Halloween workshkop
Time for shivers, scares, and thrills, for pumpkin grins in windowsills, for black cats in the full moon’s glow, and a happy Halloween HELLO!
Although I’m not at all a fan of celebrations that don’t belong to our culture and prefer to live them in the country of it’s origin, there seem to be things in our lives these days we can hardly avoid. My children love Halloween and I had to give in the costumes and the evening of “süßes sonst gibts saures“. It became fun.
This was some serious cutting, sawing and hollowing with excited happy faces all over the atelier tripping over each other the whole weekend. They made over 50 pumpkins. Yes.
So I hope you are all ready for the scary night. I am done with pumpkins for a year. I don’t think I even want to eat one.
Papier mâché foxes
This was fun. A bunch of us walking to the playground to fill up the empty bottles with sand. There is a little road dividing the atelier from the playground and I had to stand in the middle of it for all of the kiddos to pass safely to the other side while the cars wait. Then the kids stopped too. And made a circle around me … eeem….. so we were all standing in the middle of the road for a while looking at each other. Who why how when… Ha! I don’t exactly go often with ten 6 year olds walking around the streets so I forget about the pre-announcements.
Anyway we survived and these foxes are cute. Children loved taking home something in a 3-D form being as well a sweet animal. It is a papier mache and I found the project following this amazing web site smallhandsbigart.
Black&white on white&black
So if you are careful you might notice on the last photo (I did my best to cut it out elsewhere) we have a new wall at school.
Well I don’t really like it! It’s red and white and red and white and with this a bit of this and a bit of that it simply makes a bit of a mess behind our exposed work.
It is also magnetic which is nice but it seems it is especially lovely if you are a teenager passing the art work. Half of the magnets are gone in a day and the work is hanging lucidly on those red and white stripes.
I do hope kids get fed up with magnets. And I do hope someone paints white over red.
I feel like writing an ode to my old wall, or at least a haiku.
Here are the works of mostly 5 but also some of 8 and 9 year old children. We made a black and white background and did observational drawings of dragon flies using b&w lines just the opposite to the background. They really came out pretty.
And DO NOT TOUCH those magnets ARE MINE!!
Papier mâché balloons
Oh dear! Should I remember?
We did this workshop quite a while ago and honestly, the result is cute but THIS was a mess.
I don’t think I ever had a workshop that wouldn’t somehow work but this…………….
I don’t want to put anyone off this job so just sayin’: DO try out the balloons before you allow kids touching them!!
Such lovely idea, a simple balloon, a precious token of childhood!!
Children are young, 3-6 yo’s, it’s easy, it’s messy, it’s sticky… they will love it.
Well it was all that really but it was also LOUD. Which I didn’t predict. I did so many papir mâchés in my life, no need to try anything! But it turned out that those expensive balloons were tickling bombs. So easy they burst and SO loud, that honestly, I think this children might have had some nightmares. Plus they had to start all over again too many times!
So do try out before using, says this post!
100: Action painting with music
This project was connected to the school unit of self exploring. It was an action painting. I chose five different pieces of classical music for children to listen to while their eyes were closed. Then at some point while the piece was still running they were asked to start painting by simply moving their hands from far or close, dripping, splashing, painting with brush, moving their body while walking around the paper. For each piece a child chose a different colour (with few exceptions) which was documented during work.
Antonio Vivaldi, Storm
Wolgang Amadeus Mozart, Piano Sonate No.26
Ludwig Van Beethowen, 5th Symphony
Johann Sebastian Bach, ConcertoNo.4
Ludwig Van Beethowen, Sonate 9
BTW!!! This is THE 100th post on my blog. How sweet!!!
Block printing
Kids love printing. Printing and clay. If they won’t know the project ahead they will shout PRINTING!! or CLAY!!
So we did some block printing of folk birds and horses!!
Inspiration was a Marimekko designer Sanna Annukka. No really, more than her was Smallhandsbigart, where I saw lovely bird prints of children from another side of the planet.
Print me a horse
This was a lovely easy going project. These girls all love horses, of course, they have seen them many times and they therefor had no problem of drawing one. How cute and self confident are these? I just love them.
Instructions are, I think, well captured on the photos. Draw, cut out, add materials, a bit of cutting again, add colour, print.
Simple and efficient!
Making flip books
This was a 4 hours workshop of very fine results. I really underestimated the children on this one! I thought it will be so hard I even made a back up plan of making comics if this might not work.
We watched some you tube videos together and in not even 5 minutes had these geniuses an idea of what to draw. And they all worked wonders!
I realized with flip book you sort of know immediately if the idea will work or not. Honestly my head was empty on the day and if the kids had no vision of what to place in the picture, I think I might not be able to help. So this was all completely their work, with my eagle eye intensively focused on their technique, but they worked alone on that pretty well too.
There are FOUR VIDEOS on the bottom of this page. You will have to download to watch but no worries, it is safe.
Layer abstract painting and Patrick Heron
What a very fine project this was!
We spoke about Patrick Heron and his amazing work.
Children have cut some forms out of pre painted paper (Matisse style) and glued them on their paper. This is just to make the further process easier.
Next step was cold colours. They got only primary colours, black and white and were then told to mix them into cold colours and paint some more shapes close to the ones they glued.
Next step are warm colours and warm colours only. Make some more shapes.
Final and last steps is black: some lines and borders in between the layers and some dots or any other pattern.
The project turned out so very lovely and rich!! I found it on here and fell in love with it.
