Silly Art!

A dear friend gave me a book called, "Discovering Great Artists: Hands-On Art for Children in the Styles of the Great Masters" about almost a year ago.  It's a great book with different art lessons. Each one has a * for the level of difficulty, and it goes from level one to three.

One of the lessons proved to be really fun for my boys and their work even made a nice addition to our kitchen wall.

Here's what we did. (Warning: It gets pretty messy.)

Materials:

six inch pieces of yarn (one for each paint color)

at least 4 paint colors in a bowl (add water if the paint is rather thick), using one bowl per color

large white paper or 4 pieces of paper taped together

cardboard to go under the paper

Set the cardboard on the floor.  Place the paper on top of the cardboard.  Use masking tape to stick the paper to the floor.  Have kids dip the string into the paint of their choice and then, standing up, have them drop the paint-soaked yarn on the paper. SPLAT! They can then remove the yarn from the paper and start again. 

If your children are like mine, this will go on until there is no more paint in any of the bowls.  Once it's dry, you can frame it and display their art!  

I made the mistake of not putting anything underneath the white paper.  Since the boys put gobs and gobs of paint on it, it saturated the paper and stuck to the floor.  Consequentially, as I was carefully trying to peel the paper off the floor, random parts of it ripped.  So I cut out different parts of the art work and placed them into small frames.  

Tada!

My little artists..... :)