Mixed Media Scarecrows

We love seasonal art projects! Scarecrows are an awesome autumn subject, so our young artists made these mixed media scarecrows using crayons and watercolor to create a wax resist painting. After the artwork dried, we added details using 3-D elements, such as straw, feathers, flowers, and buttons. 

More Autumn Home School Art!

Another autumn project we created was a lovely path called "A Fall Walk Through the Woods." 

This is done with soft pastels, a medium we try to practice using now and then. 

This was a good project for learning how and when to layer and smudge the pastel colors while creating various textures and atmosphere.


We also learned a little more about one-point perspective, which everyone seemed to have successful with.


Our artists used a variety of colors for their pathways, including a very dark night scene.   

 

Autumn Home School Art!

Autumn offers so many wonderful opportunities for art-making! I just have to share more of our Home School Art Club's creative work.

These first pieces are mixed media leaf rubbings. The students first make simple leaf rubbings using cheap white copy paper and a black crayon laying on its side, pressing hard.

They then paint the leaves using two or three colors on each leaf. 








After the leaves are dry, they cut out the leaves and glue them to a piece of colored card stock. 






Now they will draw a series of lines from top to bottom of the paper. The lines move and swirl around the shapes of the leaves, an art technique that portrays movement. They should start with black Sharpies to create their basic line patterns, then use two more colors using oil pastels (or metallic Sharpies, which was their idea), to fill in between the black lines. The goal was to not touch any other lines and to let the paper show between the lines. 


They look just like leaves tumbling down from the trees, don't they?

Home School OWL ART!

Our Home School Art Club has been super busy, as always! 

In October they worked on this amazing OWL ART.


These were done using oil pastels on black paper. 

Each student selected a photo of an owl to paint from our resource files. 

Then they transferred the image in pencil to their black paper and selected a 'palette' of colors to use for their painting - which simply means matching each color in the photo to an oil pastel stick, which is then kept separated from the set until the project is done.  Students learned to press lightly, heavily, or to layer colors to get desired colors, textures, and other effects. 

Halloween ART!

HALLOWEEN is such a fun time of year - for art projects! 

This year we were ready with all sorts of fun Halloween-themed art projects for the kids to choose from and create!

We made a few 3-D projects, such as:  

silly Halloween blockheads, 










freaky fuzzy spiders,











movable mummies,

hanging bats,










and ghoulish gravestones.






I love how Halloween lets kids just be kids!

More Halloween Art!

All of this Halloween artwork features -- silhouettes!

Moonlit graveyards!











Moonlit owls!

Spooky trees and moonlit bats!

Patterned Pumpkin Art

We created these bold patterned pumpkins in the style of Romero Britto. 

First we drew a pumpkin - LARGE!

Then we taped our paper down to a painting board and mixed several tints of orange tempera paint.



We filled in all of the sections of the pumpkin with different orange colors, then divided the background into four sections and painted each section a different color.

After drying, we filled in each painted section with a pattern of some kind. Dots, stripes, circles, zigzags, whatever we could think of. We used white tempera paint for many of these patterns.  





We used sponge stamps and other items to create some of our patterns (such as circles from a soda bottle lid), but many we just painted on with a brush. 



Aren't they awesome?