art – Page 3 – the long thread

March 24, 2009

Sketch Box

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Here’s a quick little gift that I made for a five-year-old budding artist. I used a plain wooden box and filled it with drawing materials. Some of you long-time blog readers may remember the Craft Can. I definitely like giving art and craft supplies to kids. Here’s a blank template for the sketch box. The background color is in fact a bit different from the image above.

You can print the design on sticker paper or card stock and affix with spray adhesive. For the corners, I used a corner rounding punch (my favorite new craft supply). In the box I included a sketch pad, colored pencils, graphite pencils, a compass and protractor, letter stencils, a pencil sharpener and a small wooden figure model.

March 9, 2009

Grid Painting

make-it-monday

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Here’s a project that my six-year-old wanted to try after thinking about this painting that was made by her Daddy. Can you tell that this is a ladybug?

We used a piece of printable canvas and acrylic paints since that’s what we had on hand. She drew the ladybug with pencil, then I left the room to look for a ruler. When I came back, she had drawn her own grid. Well, OK! You could make the squares as small or as large as you want them. I asked her to paint one square at a time and leave some space around the edges, but she took it from there. She had a couple of spots that she painted the wrong color, but since we were using acrylic paint we let the paint dry and she painted over them. I think she made some interesting art and managed to use both sides of her brain in the process.

grid-painting-steps

December 31, 2008January 1, 2009

Artwork Collage

Last summer I posted about the Jan Eleni collage available at Love (for a hefty price), and I finally got around to trying it out as a Christmas gift for my husband from our daughter. We selected 28 pieces of her artwork, scanned them in and printed them on card stock. Each image was 3″ x 4″ and the frame was 24″ x 30″. You could definitely make them smaller and fit more. Then I just taped them down in case we want to change out the artwork someday.

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My four-year-old just hasn’t accumulated a critical mass of artwork, so she made a collage of her own with paper and fabric scraps. It’s called So Many Houses on a Street.

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September 23, 2008September 23, 2008

Swallowfield

I have included Portland, Maine artist Jennifer Judd-McGee in my Etsy Finds Friday in the past, but wanted to post some of her new work for a current show at Ink + Peat in Portland, Oregon (yes, from one Portland to another).

Her work is mostly mixed media collage. In addition to great color, texture and organic shapes, you can see the influence of quilting patterns. Check here for more quilt-inspired images. And you can buy prints and originals in her Etsy shop here. Oh, and you can read her blog here.

June 24, 2008June 24, 2008

The Difficulty of Having Me for a Mother

It’s not going to be easy for them. We made a fabric painting for Father’s Day and I asked them to re-do it three times. It was the sizing in the fabric and the types of paint we used that caused the need to experiment. By the final go, the three-year-old didn’t want to paint anymore. I did let them choose the colors and paint any way they wanted. I am working on the control issues.

In the end, we went with a washed canvas fabric (to remove sizing) and acrylic paints mixed with water. The kids squirted the paint on with squirt bottles to create puddles. Then I cut the fabric into strips, stapled the strips to an old wooden frame and the five-year-old weaved the strips together. I would like to do another one with just three or four nice bright colors and keep the canvas intact. The uncut painting looks good, doesn’t it? I was thinking of the work by Helen Frankenthaler. I have always loved the rich, bleeding images she creates with unprimed canvas.