Art - The dot

Since we were sick for a few days last week, we did more of what we usually do on weekends, which is to read.  We read the following book.  It is an amazing book and a must read for kids!

Here is some artwork inspired by the book.  The first two are by D, next is mine and the last one is M.

If you look closely you will see tiny little dots made by M!

Georgia O'Keeffe 3D Flower

After our discussion on Georgia O'Keeffe, I searched around  ideas to do a project based on her art and found this.  I knew D would love it.  I also found a free video tutorial on this project at Home Art Studio.  We watched the video and got to work.  We used just regular paper and oil pastels, scissors and a glue stick.  Since I did the project together with D, I don't have pictures of the work in action.  Anyways, enjoy the finished product!

D decided to make her flower real colorful and used different colors

Mine is a copy of the work in the tutorial

Here is M's 3D Art.  We always include her in whatever we do and M colored her paper and decided to cut and glue and create this piece! Now it hangs proudly with our artwork!

More Recent Artwork

The time that D is not spending reading or doing school work is fully consumed by the art and sketching that she does.  She is obsessed with creating little abstract sketches, and we go through one 100 page sketchbook every 2-3 days!  So here are some of the works that she has approved to be posted online!

She calls this "Close up of Flowers and Leaves".  After she created this, I told her that there was another American Artist called Georgia O'Keeffe who did draw flower close ups.  Since then she has been obsessed with researching about her!

Here is another WIP!

After our recent African studies, D has also been tracing the outline of her hands and been creating different kinds of artwork.  Here she using black marker to draw her hands and designs, then used tempera paint, q-tips and fingers(!) to make it colorful!

She calls this "Tribal Art"

Another one, but this time she used paint and made the text on the paint using finger prints and folding paper.  The texture is amazing to look at in person than in picture.  She then traced her hand, then some valentines and of course a couple of girl faces!

While I had no input on the artworks above, the following couple were initiated by me.  The first one is a "City by the River".  We used the techniques described here.

City by the river.

This next one, was created using oil pastels.  D created the daytime one and I did the night time one.

Oil pastel - City at Day (by D) and City at Night (by me).

Artist in focus: Paul Klee

 It has been a long time wish of mine to study some of the works of great artists with my kiddos.  We kept postponing this for some reason or the other.  So finally this month I decided to start.  We started with Paul Klee.  He shares a December Birthday with D and so we decided to start with him.  We used the following three books, to study about the artist, his style and some of his works.

So, this afternoon we worked on the projects in the Mary Ann Kohl book, that focused on lines.  The technique was simple.  We use a black sharpie to create a work with just one single continuous line.  Then we used water colors to color it in.  We did one real and one abstract painting.  We also did a sculpture.  We used pipe cleaners instead of floral wires as suggested in the book and that is what I had on hand.  After doing our pictures we wanted to provide interesting names for the paintings and sculpture just like Paul Klee!  Here are the finished products.

M called hers Fireworks Blue!

Beach Day by  D

Tchaikovsky's Ballet by D

Xmas Day sculpture using pipe cleaners by D and M.

D's Latest Art/Geometry Obsessions

I mentioned D's latest obsession with Geometric Patterns in my last post.  I wanted to post a few of her art works from recent days.  She has free handed some of these, used the shapes from the Geometric Cabinet or just used a ruler and paper.  She meticulously works for hours on each of these and would rather be doing only this than anything else all day!

She awarded me with this the other day appreciating me for helping her with something!

You should be able to see some curvilinear triangles in the above design.  She hand drew some of this.

We also have this Mandala Designer and this provides with hours of drawing time.

She is obsessed with creating patterns and tessellating with Pattern Blocks.

She creates such elaborate designs that I am thinking it would be good to get more geometric shapes and may be another set of the same shapes so she will have enough for her designs!

Our last couple of weeks

We've been enjoying the great weather and meeting friends these last few weeks.  We've been doing school only when the weather has been rainy.  Here are a few pictures from what we've been doing, I did not take pictures of a lot of stuff, so there aren't many photos.

Plenty of Art with Oil Pastels - Our new favourite medium!

We attended a local spring festival, watched shearing sheep and visited the pets.  Isn't this a cool photo?!

We've been revisiting a lot of our old Math Trays, trying to revise old concepts.  D is working on the Teens in the above picture.

I've always wanted to do some graphing and data analysis with D.  This activity was sparked by one of the recent "Sid the Science Kid" episodes.  We sorted a bunch of buttons by color, shape or no. of button holes and tried to analyze that.  We estimated minimum and maximums before graphing and it was fun to see if our predictions were right!

Sorted by Shape

Placed it the sorted groups on a graph.  Since this was an impromptu activity I improvised by drawing X-Y axis on a piece of Cardstock!

By Color

Sorted by no. of Button Holes and ready to be graphed.  We only had two and four holed buttons so this turned out not such a great idea!

We have been working on a bunch of grammar and been doing a lot of reading. We've also been exploring our continent boxes and doing some sensorial work.

Iceberg Painting

Last Friday, we decided to be artists in Antarctica and paint an Iceberg using salt and paint! 

Here are two views of the finished product!

After we were done, we put our iceberg out in the snow!

I saw this activity here.  It might be a cool thing to do in the summer, but I thought D would enjoy it as part of our Antarctic Unit.  I was right, she spent a good amount of time on this activity and we even got to discuss some details of salt, ice and melting point!

Snowflakes - Crayon Resist Watercolor

Here is another winter activity that is popular this season both on Pinterest and the blog world.  It fit well with our Antarctica unit too.  We had an afternoon of quiet art time today.

This activity is very simple.  

1. You use white or a light colored crayon to draw snowflakes or patterns of your choice on a sheet of paper.  
2. We also did a crayon rubbing of a big snowflake and some confetti. 
3. Cut the paper into into smaller pieces.  
4. Color each piece using water colors.  
5. Assemble your artwork, hang and enjoy!  

The pieces we used for crayon rubbing, plastic snowflake ornament and confetti.

Finished work, drying.

Proud display on our Art wall.

This post is linked to Montessori Monday.

Drawing Faces

I recently came across this book about drawing faces when I read a post about it at The Artful Parent. I immediately had to check it out as this seemed like something D would enjoy. I got a copy from our local library and D went crazy drawing faces!  It has simple, easy to understand instructions that the child can follow without parental guidance.  I had set this book and a few sheets of paper with a marker on D's shelf this week and this book was the center of her school this week!

The book we got from the library is a smaller one than the one displayed above in Amazon, probably a different edition.

Above is a picture of a page from this book, so you can see how easy this is.

D drew all of the above herself and would have done more if she had not run out of paper! 

Here are some of my favorites!

Surprised Sam

Proud Paul

Tired Tilly

Puzzled Polly

Since this book was such a hit, I am planning to buy this book and check out the other titles from this author from the library.  Here are a few other ones listed on Amazon.