Making an Art Cart

ART WORKSHOP, the new book by Barbara Rucci with essays by Betsy McKenna, has so many wonderful ideas for colorful projects with children. The focus of these process oriented projects is for kids to explore the materials in a non pressure way developing their own curiosity, creativity and vocabulary.

There are a lot of things I like about this book, but what I was first taken by ( besides the luscious images) was how articulate this book is on supporting the making of art at home with your kids and creating an easily accessible space for your children to do so.

Excerpt from Art Workshop-
In the art room, Children work with their hands and innovate. The colorful and inviting materials feed their imagination and the dedicated space gives them  the freedom to explore their ideas. Open- ended creativity in the art room empowers our children to mess about, take risks and discover that they have good original ideas. -

This is such a thoughtful and invigorating way to think of the importance of children having the freedom to make art at home.

Okay so you may know this but I teach art to children ages 2-11 and since I have opened the Purple Twig studio here in LA I have not given my children much support in creating art at home. Now I am always bringing materials home from the studio when we have a big project in mind like making something for a class at school or for the holidays but not on an everyday spontaneous level.

Barbara talks about creating both permanent and temporal spaces for children own art materials so they can bring them out when the kids are so inclined. My home is quite small so I really responded to the idea of an art cart that the kids could wheel around from room to room ( well hopefully to wheel outside to create works of art since we are in Southern California).  I found this cart at IKEA and is what Barbara uses in the book, but any kind of device cart would do. I loaded it with the kinds of things my children art interested in.

Drawing materials are always a must to have and my children love watercolor so I filled the cart with watercolor pencils and paints and paper,  as well as, colored charcoal for drawing, paints and I found this old fish tackle box at a flea market which fit perfectly on the cart and fit all kinds of beads and bobbles in it.

They love the ease of wheeling it around to where they want ,and with my encouragement, outside.

I really can not tell you how excited I am by now having this in my home. I was taking the fact that my kids make so much art with me at the studio for granted. They love and needed an art cart at home.  If you are looking for something to distract your children from a screen, this is a fantastic idea.

For more information about the book go to artbarblog or just buy the book on Amazon

Spooky Bug Boxes

All this month we were hired to put together workshop every Thursday at One Colorado courtyard in old town Pasadena. It has been incredibly fun creating new projects each week for children and adults alike. As you all may know I love gathering and creating projects using recycled and found materials. Here is a great Halloween project using used mint tins - Bug collection tin.

Things you'll need-
- mint tin
- decorative paper- I used this beautiful black and white webbed paper from Paper Source along     with pages from a book and orange and black papers.
-watercolor paper
- oils pastels
- watercolor cakes or crayons
- orange and black sequins
-two little squares of cardboard about 1 inch X 1 inch

The first thing the kids did was to look at books with all kinds of insects and arachnids in them, beetles, caterpillars, cicadas, moths, spiders and scorpions. I then gave them a small piece of watercolor paper and oil pastels to draw their bug and add watercolor if they wanted.

After cutting it out their insects they were ready to decorate their mint tins to make a home for their insects. They layered on papers and sequins and black glitter. ribbons and pieces of orange and black paper.

One of the aspects of teaching these kinds of workshops that I so enjoy is watching the parents and children work together making something creative, talking about ideas and techniques. I also love seeing the excitement of the children at the materials they get to use. There is utter joy on their faces at the prospect of orange and black sprinkles or decorative papers or ribbon.

When they are finished decorating their boxes we are now ready to use the small pieces of cardboard. glue them one on top of each other into the middle of the tin and glue the insect right on top. This allows the bug to hover a bit over the background to give it a bit more animation. 

Seed Faces

Halloween! Halloween! HALLOWEEN! 

We love Halloween around here. One of the things we love is all the ways one can decorate a pumpkin, you can carve it, or paint it, add stickers, add tape or ribbon, glue on buttons or paper.

I do so love a face on a pumpkin so this year we decided to add seeds to our pumpkins. It's a simple way of decorating which also celebrates the fall harvests.

Here is what you need-

A pumpkin- we used a small cooking pumpkin.
A hot glue gun.
Some seeds- I used sunflower seeds and pumpkin seeds

After you glue all the seeds on you might want to pick all the strings of the hot glue off. I didn't have my glasses on when I took this picture so I didn't see the glue strings until later. It's still cute though. Right?

Fruit Bowls

Kids love stamping and I am always looking for ways to use stamps that are thoughtful and not just stamping on a piece of paper. Some very generous person donated these beautiful fruit and vegetable stamps to us which made me think of cornucopias or fruit bowls so that is just what we did.

I taught the children to draw a glass bowl with an opening at the top. After that they could just choose any fruit or vegetable they wanted to put in their bowl. We talked about the colors of these natural foods so they could chose their own colors. 

I also gave them large sponges so they could clean off their stamps which is respectful to their fellow artists. In essence they were working together, sharing both the stamps and the inks as a group.

It was interesting that just that simple line drawing of a bowl gave them a purpose in the stamping. They made decisions about whether fruits were inside the bowl or spilling out of the bowl or even dropping into the bowl from some unknown force. The drawing of the bowls also made each picture individual because each were so different from each other, different shapes and sizes.

For those who don't have stamps this would work really well with using actual fruit to print as well, apples, pears, grapes, star fruit.

Red Tricycle Finalist

We are so excited to be a finalist in the Red Tricycle Totally Awesome awards 

for best art classes in Los Angeles. 

Please! Please! Please take a moment to

Vote for us 

We so want to be awesome!!!

Making Layered Prints

 Every once in a while we like to introduce our young artists to an important historical artist. This summer in our Printmaking week of summer camp we made an introduction to Jasper Johns, who used letters and numbers in his paintings and prints. It's important to us that the children still use their own voice in making when we create works inspired by another artist. That way they can get a feeling for the technique all the while learning about process and art history all at the same time. Looking and making go hand and hand.

We began by creating a surface to print on. Jasper Johns paintings are so lush with color and texture that I wanted to mimic that lushness by layering the prints with collage. The kids created the collages by choosing from many textured and colored decorative papers.

 The kids then made their own printing plates using colored flexible foam sheets, cutting out whatever number or letter they wanted. Some chose to spell out their whole name in different shaped letters and some chose a favorite number. By cutting out the the foam and gluing it on cardboard made it easier to glue the shapes down backwards and talk about how all stamps and printing plates are mirror images of what is printed.

 After everything was dry the kids were ready for printing.

Using water soluble printing ink the kids chose between 3 colors, black, gold and red ( I chose those colors because they are so bold and graphic and would stand up to the colorful collages). Pieces of plexiglass acted as our inking plates. We used brayers to roll the inks from our inking plates onto our printing plates.

The result were these layered and lush prints. The kids could see how the different inks on the different collages created a variety of artworks even though we used the same printing plate.

I often wonder when we do these types of projects inspired by well known artists what they might think of the work.

Ice Exploration

For our Potions and Spells week of camp we create soaps and candles, using essential oils,  Bug Bite salves from basil and  lip balm from mint to name a few projects.  These are great for kids to learn the medicinal properties of herbs but we need to follow the recipes in order for these wonderful treats to work. It was important to us to come up with some exploratory projects in between the very structures ones so that kids could use their minds for observations and discussions amongst themselves. We came up with ice. It seemed like a great material for the kids to make a transformation to occur.

Okay so now where are we going to get 4 big blocks of ice?  I decided to make them by using washed milk cartons, filling them with water and freezing them for two days.  After frozen, I ripped off the outer milk carton to reveal a beautiful solid block of ice. We diluted some liquid watercolor for each little artist along with a pipette and poured salt into cups for each of them. They loved the salt so have a lot on hand. We use salt so much in the studio that I buy 25 pound bags from smart and final. 

We then let the children explore adding the color and the salt, which sparked a lot of conversation and observation. They mixed colors on the ice to create new colors and watch it run off the ice. They melted the ice using the salt. 

And boy did they explore. We had the children working in teams and they really spent the time working together with their peers as they melted and dyed the ice.