Posts Tagged ‘children’
Every Child is an Artist
“It looks prettier with blue in it” Oil paint and natural pigment on a paper bag by our Daughter aged nearly 4
Every child is an artist, children can also see art more than adults, often. I recon that if art was” taught” in a more encouraging way in schools and by parents, and adults nurtured children’s creativity that the next generation would be a lot more confident about making art and looking at other people’s art.
Arty child’s play with kitchen stuff!
You don’t need to spend any money to make art, sometimes you could just reach for the spice rack and rummage around the kitchen in search of inspiration. Maybe you could even eat it too! You can use out of date spices that have been sitting in the cupboard for 10 years! Food colouring for that green St Patrick’s Day Leprechaun’s hat cake you made a long time ago!
Last night, while one of our children slept, refusing to wake up from a nap, I started to cut up pizza boxes for our wide awake daughter to paint on. Usually the thing that puts me off painting with our children or letting them paint on their own is the amazing mess they make! It is such an ordeal, changing clothes first, constantly cleaning paint off them and everything else around them. I am a bit silly I suppose letting them paint with my oil paints! So I reached for the turmeric, paprika and soy sauce, three wizened potatoes a couple of reused plastic containers and the biscuit and grey squares from the recycled pizza boxes, I find this better than paper for children to paint on as it is tough and does not get all scrupled up. I cut out some shaped to make potato prints with my well loved Swiss army knife. I forgot that when you print it comes out in reverse, be warned!
I just realised that I should have used the pastry brush instead of the normal paint brush, to make this a completely pure kitchen art experience for our daughter! There are many more things in the kitchen to paint, print or sculpt with. Once, I made brown bread horses, and hung them off a tree for birds to eat, maybe that with be the next kitchen art project we could do. James has been teaching them to cook so they are pretty knowledgeable on spices and cooking ingredients now! Our three and a half year old made a great curry last week and our two and a half year old made a tasty Risotto!!
Messages in paper boats
messages in paper boats
I have been making paper boats, this started off by writing little messages then folding them into boats and leaving them in the secret gallery for people to open out like fortune cookies! Not sure if many people did but our children loved them! A friend of mine commissioned me to make some as wedding gifts, so the last couple of days I have been experimenting and turning these flimsy boats into something a little bit more lasting but still delicate so I dipped them in melted bees wax and paraffin wax which gave them a slightly golden glow. (Take care if you are melting wax, as once I was melting wax and it boiled over and caught fire over a gas cooker, I ran out of the house with a child under each arm while James tackled the blaze! Luckily everything was ok!) They are also waterproof and ready to sail! I love the way wax makes paper look; the boats are almost transparent and now the words are kind of sealed into them, but you can still read them, they emerge over time. I write using a pen and ink for drawing, and like to think of the drips and irregularities as adding freshness to the pieces. I believe that technology is really useful and important for many reasons, though I would never have said this before! But, the hand made and hand crafted, the hand written letters, I hope they will always be written, for they bring something to our lives that technology cannot replace. As well as the messages, I have been using repeated words over and over, mantras such as: Love Laughter, Truth Trust, and Love Unity and writing them on the boats. I really enjoy the lightness of these little boats; turning something two dimensional into a hand held object. They can be flattened again. I like the idea of posting them to different destinations.
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