Monthly Archives: February 2011

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My boys go back to school tomorrow, and I’m not ready to let them go! We had a lovely relaxed week. There was time for this

Painting in the studio

And time for this

Don't mess with the Lego set-up...

And this

Pattern blocks

And time for this

The beach in winter

Which led to this.

A winter nature table

In other words, lots of unstructured time that the kids could fill by doing what they wanted—reading, creating with Legos, getting outside. One morning the boys tried to launch a toy car from the arm of the futon to the table, trying to build ramps to help. Another day, the two youngest tried to see if they could pile up enough pillows and big, squishy blocks to reach the ceiling. The TV didn’t go on once all week. This wasn’t necessarily my plan—if the boys had asked to watch a DVD or two, I probably would have said yes—but they never asked. (When it’s just me and G at home, the TV doesn’t go on unless I’m sick and in dire need of fifteen minutes on the couch.)

At the beginning of the week we vaguely discussed going to one of the many nearby museums or nature centers or aquariums to take advantage of the activities scheduled to fill school vacation week, but when it came right down to it, nobody wanted to leave the house or get up at a specific time or get dressed on a schedule. (We did go to the library once, but only to pick out books, not take in a program.) So we ended up with a glorious week of unplugged creative child-led activities.

Coming up this week, posts on how we turned V’s art into a stamp and the week’s painting activities. In the meantime, for fellow New Englanders, here are a few upcoming events we’re excited about:

Mo Willems at the Eric Carle Museum on March 27. (Not familiar with Mo Willems? See here!) March 20th is the 3rd Annual The Very Hungry Caterpillar Day; I think I’ll be planning something for us to do at home.

Collaboration ’11 at the Jamestown Arts Center. Drop-off is on March 29, and the exhibition is from April 1-28. Everyone is welcome to participate.

The return of The Big Draw at the RISD Museum on April 30.

Any upcoming arts-related events in your neighborhood (or beyond?) that you’re excited about? Share!

Yarn Art

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(Somewhat inspired by this activity from Family Fun magazine.)

Materials: Yarn scraps, cornstarch glue (recipe in link above), and some type of strong paper (we used vellum paper)

While flipping through the February issue of Family Fun, I saw this activity involving paste and yarn and I thought it had potential, if you take away the pre-determined end product and the confines of the cookie cutter. I thought, how fun would it be to run your hands along that sticky paste and put those yarn scraps any place you wanted? So that is what G and I did. (Click on pictures to embiggen.)

As a knitter, I have no shortage of yarn scraps. Whenever I weave in and cut those pesky ends, I save them. I can’t help it. They might come in useful some day. And so I have overflowing bags of yarn ends, in any color you can think of. I cut some down, but I left the bag on the table, and G let me know if she needed a color that wasn’t already in the pile.

I’d showed her how to do it: Put the yarn in the glue, run your fingers down the yarn, and put it on the paper. As she worked, she repeated these instructions out loud. She told me what color she wanted, and she let me know if it was too long and if so, where I should cut it for her.

Look at those wonderfully messy hands! (They belong to a girl who is in charge of her creation!) Speaking of color, it’s so much fun to watch a toddler learn color, and it’s been fairly gratifying to see how much of this is learned and expressed as we work with color in the studio. Hurrah for hands-on experiential learning.

Towards the end, G indicated she needed a particular small ball of yarn. At first I thought she was asking for the dark grey portion, which was in the middle of the bundle (it was a scrap ball from a self-patterning yarn). But no, she wanted the balls themselves, and she glued them on. Here’s her finished piece.

I  never would have thought of that, and I wasn’t sure it would stay, but who am I to place limits on ideas? They’re staying put just fine, and she took her yarn art into another dimension!

A few minutes into this activity, she said, “Mama too. Mama make shape too.” And so I did.

Field Trip: RISD Art Museum

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Another Sunday, another trip to an art museum. This time, the art museum of the Rhode Island School of Design (known as RISD, pronounced Riz-dee). The purpose of this visit: to see the Impressionist galleries (“Monet and his friends,” as N says, after Linnea) and participate in the Open Family Studio, the theme of which was “Rip, Tear, Fold.”

On our way to the Open Studio we checked out the 20th Century Gallery, where we got to see a Jackson Pollock and a Bridget Riley in person. The Exempla exhibit, which is interactive, has been a hit with the kids every time we’ve visited since it opened. And we all love to visit the big Buddha.

But N very much wanted to visit Monet and his friends.

He got close to see the dabs of paint. He backed away to see the overall effect.

“Me, too,” says G.

These galleries are, I think, my favorite place in the museum. They are so calming to me. It’s not that I don’t like the more contemporary art (I do, very much) or the ancient art, or many, many things in between, it’s just that when I walk into the Impressionist Galleries, I feel like I’ve just taken a deep breath of sweet, meadow-green air.

Ahh.

***

Some practical advice for taking children to an art museum:

1. Don’t take hungry (or tired) kids to the museum. It’s about a 45-minute drive for us, so we gave them food on the way and food again once we got back into the car.

2. Know what you want to see. You can’t see it all, not in one visit, anyway. If you feel you must see everything once you’ve paid admission, take advantage of free days or “pay what you can” days, check if your local library has a membership pass you can borrow, or consider buying your own membership. Any of those options take the pressure off on feeling like you have to get your admission’s worth, and when you’re not feeling that pressure, it’s going to be a better visit with kids.

3. If your art museum has times or programs geared towards kids, try to take advantage of those. It was good to balance our looking with some doing. (I wonder if they trained the guards ahead of time? I could tell all those children in the galleries were making some of them twitchy, but they were trying really, really hard not to show it.)

4. Limit the visit length and timing depending on the age of youngest child. We were probably there about an hour and a half, maybe a little more. Get out before the kids start to lose it. We visited in the morning, because that’s the best time of day for a two-year-old. (You will never find me anywhere with all three children in the late afternoon unless I absolutely can’t avoid it.)

5. Remind them not to run and not to touch (unless the exhibit invites them to, as the Exempla exhibit does), but invite them to look and ask questions. If we want kids to grow into adults who value art museums, we need to let them be kids who feel welcome in art museums. I really appreciate the effort RISD is making, with the increase in family programs, to welcome families with children, even young ones.

6. Have fun. Look. Talk about what you see and what you’re interested in, too. Buy some postcards of favorite works on the way out. G brought a postcard of the big Buddha to bed with her the night of our visit.

If you have any other ideas or tips that have worked for you and/or stories about visiting an art museum with a child (or two or six…), please share them in the comments!

Visiting the art museum = happy.

Looking and Reading

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On one of the many snow days in the past month, I brought out some of my art books for the kids–at first, mainly my six-year-old–to look at. (Click pictures to embiggen and see titles.)

(Appropriately, my art history book from college is anchoring this pile!) We started by flipping through The Art Book for Children. I was curious what would interest my son. Right away he wanted to know what was going on in this picture:

How exciting it must be to see that for the first time–an adult, flinging paint around like that. (That, of course, is Jackson Pollock.)

He was also struck by the Op Art pieces by Bridget Riley. The other kids were drawn in, and we spent some time flipping through the books, talking about what we saw. My six-year-old also gravitated right to a small black-and-white reproduction of Van Gogh’s Cypresses, which was in the Georgia O’Keeffe book.

The next time I was at the library, I picked out some more books to bring home

and requested a few more through inter-library loan.

(The Op Art book that is open in the picture above is Optic Nerve by Joe Houston and Dave Hickey, and the large Pollock book is Jackson Pollock by Ellen Landau.)

A few days after I read Linnea in Monet’s Garden to my six-year-old, he gave a succinct and correct explanation of Impressionism to his brother. Meanwhile, we’ve learned that Cypresses is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and we are making Someday Plans to see it in person.

As with anything else, when you start looking at one thing–an artist, a movement, a picture–you begin to pull on threads that lead to other things. We are meandering through some art history right now, seeing what we like and finding connections. And it is so exciting to me both to share artists I like, and why, and to hear what my children like and are responding to. I’m thinking we’ll be trying some different styles in our own studio, too.

The other night, N asked, “What do you think it would look like if the Impressionists tried to do a close-up flower like Georgia O’Keeffe?” I don’t know! How exciting to wonder about it, though.

Basics: Supplies: Drawing

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What drawing materials do we generally have on hand? Here’s a list. Anything to add? Leave a comment!

Crayons: While beeswax crayons are great, especially for smaller hands (we have both sticks and blocks), there’s nothing wrong with a box of Crayola crayons, either. We have a couple of baby wipe containers full of standard crayons. They get used all the time. (But cheap, no-name crayons are just frustrating, and the block crayons really are the best for doing rubbings.)

Colored pencils: This comes down to preference, but definitely have some on hand. They’re easier to draw with than crayons. I can’t remember my six-year-old ever drawing with a standard, erasable pencil; he sets right in with his colored pencils. I love the confidence displayed with that decision. He’s been working with a set of Faber-Castell pencils that he was given. The supply list from the boys’ school requests Crayola brand, because, they say, they’re easier to sharpen. (I’ve never had a problem with others, but perhaps they’re easier for the kids to sharpen?) I do like the Lyra chunky pencils, especially the shorter ones for smaller hands.

Markers: We don’t use these often, but we have a set of Prismacolor permanent markers, the kind with a fat tip on one end and a skinny tip on the other. I also have some extra-fine Sharpies for drawing. I don’t like washable markers; they smear. We’ve had a set of permanent markers since my oldest was about four. At first he used them with supervision, as did his younger brother when the time came. But it didn’t take long for either of them to be able to use permanent markers on their own in a completely trustworthy way. Right now, they’re on a shelf my two-year-old can’t reach.

Pastels: Crayola oil pastels are inexpensive and easy to hold. Pastels also come in a chalk variety. We all really enjoy drawing with the pastels.

Colored chalk: We have both the blackboard kind, and the drawing kind. Be aware that anything that says “drawing” generally isn’t recommended for chalkboards.

Conte crayons: I just like these, and they’re a nice addition if you’re experimenting with various media.

Charcoal: Black, white, pencils, sticks, vine, willow. Get an assortment and experiment.

Drawing pencils: I’m not a big fan of erasable pencils. I think it can lead to overthinking and trying to reach perfection—I think when the option to erase exists, it will be taken, until a child gets so focused on getting that one detail just right that he loses perspective on the drawing as a whole. That’s not to say that your child might behave differently, or that at some point a drawing pencil really is going to be just the right tool for the job. (We used them, for example, for our shadow drawings.) So what you need to know, if you are looking to buy artist drawing pencils rather than the standard office-supply #2 pencil, is that they’re rated according to hardness. If you like a very soft pencil, go for the B side of the scale; the higher the number before the B, the softer it is. If you like a hard pencil, go towards the H end of the scale–again, the higher the number, the harder it is. 2H roughly corresponds to a basic #2 pencil. (For another take on not using pencils, see this post–and comments–on Deep Space Sparkle.)

One of our sets of sketching pencils (out of order)

One of our sets of sketching pencils (out of order)

Explanation of pencil hardness from inside the tin of the pencil set.

Explanation of pencil hardness from inside the tin of the pencil set.

I think that covers the basics. Please add to this list in the comments, if you have a favorite drawing material I haven’t included. And happy drawing!

More Coffee Filter Painting

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When the boys saw our window full of painted hearts, they wanted to make some, too, and G has been asking to paint more every chance she gets. So we all painted some more coffee filter hearts (materials list in the linked post) over the weekend, and the boys cut and painted some snowflakes, too.

(We’ve had the T. Rex forever!)

It’s super duper easy to cut a snowflake from a basket-style coffee filter, because it’s already a circle. Just fold your circle in half, and then in thirds.

Fold the resulting triangle in half again.

Cut along the edges, but don’t completely cut a fold line or it will all fall apart. Paint it, if you want to. We’re having so much fun experimenting with colors, watching them run into each other in sometimes unexpected ways.

And we found the sweetest surprise when we came home around lunchtime the day after hanging all our hearts in the front window:

Heart shadows on the floor!

Painting Coffee Filters

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(Inspired by these posts at The Artful Parent.)

Materials: Coffee filters, liquid watercolors

We have lots of coffee filters left over from before we bought one of those reusable ones, and when I saw the painted snowflakes in the first linked post up there, I thought the watercolors looked so pretty on the filters. G wanted to paint with our liquid watercolors, and knowing her tendency to puddle paint in one spot…

…I thought something designed to withstand a potful of water rushing through it could probably hold up to her exuberant painting style. So I cut a bunch of filters, both bleached and unbleached, into heart shapes. G loved the idea.

If you have a surface you’re concerned about, cover it with something waterproof, such as a vinyl tablecloth or even a couple of kids’ place mats. I put that sheet of newsprint down more to delineate the work area. The watercolors soaked right through the filter, through the newsprint, and onto the table, my lovely melamine table that wipes up in two seconds flat.

We did this twice. The first time she painted many middles, leaving the edges white, and then we had lunch. After lunch, when I suggested we check if they were dry enough to hang and mentioned I’d need to flatten them a bit, she asked to paint some more. She filled most of the white spots (the water irons out the crinkles in the filters) and then had me cut more, and then a few more, hearts. When she began painting again I did encourage her to move beyond the puddle and add paint to the bare spots. We also worked on treating the paintbrush nicely. I pointed out when the bristles got all spiky from her grinding it a bit and said that’s what a paintbrush looks like when it’s not happy.

This really is a perfect material on which to paint. There is seemingly no mix of colors that will blend badly on a filter. I’d put out a container of water and suggested rinsing the paintbrush, but G didn’t quite get that. (I wasn’t really expecting much there, just wanted to start presenting the idea. A great thing about these liquid watercolors is that I can pour a bit out into a smaller container, and it’s no big deal if the remnants are mixed and can’t be poured back into the bottle.) Instead, she went down the row of colors, periodically dipping her brush into the water, which had become colored, and “painting” with that. And of course, adding water to a colored coffee filter makes for a beautiful effect as well.

When all the hearts were dry, we hung them in the window together (click to embiggen).

And as her brothers and then her father came home, she took them to the window to show them: “Painted hearts, ME!”

Alphabet Drawings

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Materials: Drawing paper, markers

Are you familiar with the book Alphabeasties? It’s an alphabet book, with an animal for each letter, but with a twist–each animal is made up of its starting letter. Not only that, but the fonts are chosen to in some way go with the animal. So the hippopotamus is made with a heavy-set H, for example. Here’s O:

Some of the pages, like this one, are gatefold pages (a term we learned during story time at the Eric Carle Museum; while I’m talking about books, if you’re not familiar with their “whole book” method, go read about it).

Because I love all things woolly, I can’t resist showing you the S page.

The sheared portion is created with a different S than the woolly portion.

We’ve had it out from the library quite a few times, and we can all relate to it on different levels. I love types and fonts, and the book is not only clever, but it invites the reader to get to know the characteristics of types and fonts, too. The authors are also graphic designers. Even if you don’t have kids, if you like type and design, it’s a really fun book.

I do have kids, though, and as we were looking through it once again, one of us got the idea to try to make our own alphabet drawings. We decided they didn’t have to be animals, and somewhere along the way the boys decided they could use color. We all made more than one, but here’s just a sampling.

That’s V’s second draft of a volcano. He decided it was okay to use Vs to outline.

N also started with his own initial, but he decided to draw himself:

I began with a balloon, and then realized I’d made it small in comparison with the paper so I added some scenery:

As V began drawing this one, he said, “Some letters look like the words they start.”

That’s an Orange on a Table with a hand reaching for it.

I think we all realized this was harder than we expected, especially if we challenged ourselves not to sketch in an outline first but to just set to, drawing with the letter. It’s fun, though! I tried to make my Bs in the balloon look buoyant, and the basket Bs look a little more linear, and the Cs for the clouds look puffy. The more you look at the Alphabeasties book, the more nuances you can find. Fun stuff.

The boys and I are mulling over making some version of our own alphabet book (not necessarily using alphabet drawings). We do have a toddler right in-house to serve as our intended audience…

Open Studio

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Yet another partial school day, so I gave the kids some ideas for activities we could do in the studio. And this is what happens when three kids want to do three different things… in retrospect, I should have made myself coffee first, but overall, it went just fine.

A couple of days ago I sliced a large sheet of watercolor paper into small squares. Some are 4″x4″ and some are 2″x2″. V decided he’d like to start with liquid watercolors and the small squares. We brought out some salt, too, to texture it a bit. He thought his art teacher had said to put the salt first, then paint. (They didn’t actually do this in class; he just told them about it.) I thought it went the other way around. So we tried both ways. (In case you’re curious, it had a more sandpapery feel when the salt goes on first, and it was smoother when the salt went on second.)

Meanwhile, N really wanted to cut up some of that textured paper we made and make a design with it. I cut some up, too–that’s my fish in the background (click to embiggen). Notice the big sun?

I tried to get G to help with the collage I was making, but beyond treating the paintbrush we were using for glue really, really badly, she wasn’t too interested. She wanted to get back to the rubber stamps I’d brought out for her the other day.

As you can see, V thought that sounded like a good idea. I thought since he was right next to her, he could help her out a bit, but no. I ended up with a rather ink-stained toddler. This might have been the point at which I realized I should have made the coffee before we started.

When N was done cutting and pasting, he wanted to make some watercolors too. Sprinkling salt was lots of fun for all three of us. Isn’t this a nice assortment of bright colors?

(The flowers are mine. I have a six-foot wall of snow bordering my driveway. A girl needs to cope somehow.) We mostly ended up with backgrounds, although V painted a couple of pictures, too, which aren’t shown here. I plan on stamping “I love you” on those purple ones and slipping the ones for the boys into their lunches on Valentine’s Day–assuming that’s not another snow day, of course.

Materials needed for these activities: Textured paper, glue, scissors, mat board (a heavier surface on which to glue the papers), small squares of watercolor paper, liquid watercolors, salt, rubber stamps and ink pads; the snow day is optional!