Art Lessons for Kids
A perennial favorite of mine, Van Gogh inspired flowers is a lesson I try to do every year with my third grade students. Sometimes my medium varies. A year ago I tried tempera painted flowers and I loved the results. I even made it into a PDF art lesson so you can see exactly how [...]
Pin It
I’ve been admiring this art project for a while now. VK Bowerman’s Laurel Burch Cat project is colorful and fun. VK doesn’t have a website, only a Flickr account, so I can’t provide a website. But please visit her Flickr page and prepare to be inspired by wonderful work. I studied VK’s project and visited [...]
Pin It
Here is a great lesson that uses oil pastels/crayons and watercolor for a classic resist lesson. Very easy to draw, this Princess and The Pea project can be achieved in two, 45-minute class sessions. This project was inspired by a Princess and the Pea art project on the Easely Amused website, a children’s art workshop in Mississippi. [...]
Pin It
This is an easy art project that you can do with any aged child. Birch trees offer a dynamic contrast to many backgrounds. The opportunities are endless. I did a tissue paper background with my sixth graders in this multi-media birch tree collage and used watercolors for this Monet inspired birch tree art lesson. Artsonia has [...]
Pin It
Here is an easy art project that takes minutes to complete. After studying Friedensreich Hundertwasser, and creating a colorful collage, some of my fifth grade students finished early. Instead of doing random free-choice art, I handed them a small piece of watercolor paper (9″ x 12″), some colored waterproof markers and a pan of watercolor [...]
Pin It
This Georgia O’Keeffe inspired art lesson is quick, easy lesson that all grade levels will enjoy. Needing a one-lesson project for the end of my sixth grade art rotation, I was inspired by an O’Keeffe art print on my wall. But instead of focusing on the center of a flower and creating a detailed drawing, [...]
Pin It
Artist James Rizzi has been providing my art students with fabulous inspiration this Fall. After finishing another James Rizzi art lesson before class was over, some students continued on the Rizzi path and created these adorable birds. The 2012 James Rizzi Wall Calendar (English, German, French, Italian, Spanish and Dutch Edition) is a great visual aid [...]
Art and Literature is a natural combination. Art lessons flow directly from the illustrated pages and right onto my student’s art tables. For this 23-page Art Booklet, I have chosen three beautifully illustrated books and created kid-friendly, classroom-tested art lessons for you to use. Each lesson has a supply list, photo-tutorials, gallery of actual student’s [...]
Learning how art impacts every culture and civilization in the world is an important part of any art curriculum. I remember learning about Canada’s native population in second grade. Making igloos from marshmallows and creating my own “Eskimo” paper doll remains my most vivid childhood art experience. The art hasn’t changed much, but the verbiage [...]
Here is a very easy watercolor lesson for any grade. Simply add puddles of liquid watercolor paint (or well-watered pan watercolors) onto watercolor paper. Before the puddles “dry” tap the paper onto the table surface to create streams of paint. These are the flower stems. After the paint dries, the artist can use chalk pastels [...]
Line drawings are a wonderful way to express creativity. No matter what the subject, you are always assured of a variety of outcomes. I chose the robot for the boys in my third grade classes. Perhaps a bit gender biased of me, but the girls were equally as excited. I demonstrated various ways to draw [...]
I have an artist friend, Karyn Walsh, who specializes in monotypes. Our kids used to sail together in Santa Barbara and as we watched their races from shore, Karyn would tell me about her art and the process of creating a monotype. Ultimately, it was the element of surprise and the texture that appealed to [...]
My third grade classes are a creative and energetic bunch. They have a hard time sitting still. Instead of trying to reign them in, I take a different approach: offer ‘em up a lesson as energetic as they are. For my Mexican Art Unit, I selected the sassy sombrero as my subject. These kids loved [...]
Regular black markers morph into beautiful watercolors with the help of a bit of water and a few techniques. An elephant is a perfect subject in which to experiment with this media as the resulting color is a perfect gray. I remember the first time I discovered that regular black ink would bleed and discolor [...]
Kinders learned how to draw evergreen trees by using a black oil pastel and green paper. We started by drawing a light triangle and then adding straight and squiggly lines for bows. We colored the trees using various green pastels. A smear of Mod-Podge provided the glue for our “snow”. After we cut the trees [...]
