Saturday, June 22, 2013

Teach Your Children About Artists With These Fun Art Projects

By Kate Halfey


A great art project provides families with a wonderful way to enjoy an afternoon, but you can also use art as an opportunity to teach your children about different artists and styles of art. Here are a few art projects for kids of all ages that also teach them about a famous artist, which can prove to be the most meaningful method to teach them about a new style of art.

Surrealism lends itself well to a children's project because one is not expected to create a picture of something exactly the way it appears to the human eye. Joan Miro is an excellent artist to copy for an art project because his works are colorful and whimsical which appeals to children. Start your project by looking at a few of his works, including "People and Dog in the Sun," "Daybreak" or "Nocturne." You will see that at their essence, these are simple pieces with lines and basic shapes. Consider having children begin by drawing one or two stick figures on a paper and then adding stars that are created with dots and lines, as well as circles. Have a few of the shapes intersect and then color the piece, taking care to color the intersecting portions different colors from the rest of the shapes.

Wassily Kandinsky is another great artist to consider teaching your children about, and his abstract works are particularly suitable for kid art projects. Begin by showing your children images of one of his works, such as "Color Studies," which basically is a diamond created out of many colors. "Squares with Concentric Circles," is another suitable painting, and all children need are squares of paper in which they draw or paint colorful circles. Explore further by using something other than crayon or marker and hand your child some chalk or oil pastels. For more advanced artists, consider creating a work in the style of "Composition X," a beautiful collage-like work of Kandinsky's that begins with a sheet of large black paper. Use oil pastels or crayon or good quality chalk to color intersecting shapes.

The works of Paul Klee are extremely striking, and there are many art projects you can consider based on his paintings which display elements of expressionism, surrealism and cubism. A work such as "Senecio," is an excellent starting point for an art project. Have children copy the basic design of the head, neck, eyes and mouth featured in the painting. They will need to trace the lines with a Sharpie or permanent marker and then color each section with oil pastels, taking care to color very heavily. Then paint over the picture with acrylic paint and when this is dry, gently scrape away much of the paint to reveal the picture underneath.

If you would like to try something that doesn't involve painting or drawing, consider looking at some of the photographic work of David Hockney. His collage style is quite fun for children to imitate. Simply look through a magazine and find a photo that looks interesting and images of nature that look quite striking. Take the picture and cut into squares and rectangles, ensuring that you still have them in order. Then glue them down on paper in order, but overlapping the pieces a bit and rotating them slightly.

While surrealism and abstract art can be easier to imitate, it is fun to introduce your child to artwork that would be a bit more difficult to imitate. One way to make this easy is to purchase a PDF collage of a famous painting online. These collages, such as those at ArtProjectsForKids.org, take a famous work and divide it into manageable squares. Children need only color each square and then arrange the squares back into the original image. There are PDFs of works by Van Gogh, Klimt, Cezanne, Gauguin, O'Keefe and many more artists.




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment