mrspicasso's art room

As previously posted here, I spent a wonderful evening making a beautiful acrylic on canvas painting with my niece. I then adapted it for classroom use, using tempera on paper. I believe they turned out just as beautiful!

First, mix several shades and tints of warm colored tempera. I love using frosting cups because they can be lidded and stacked for storage.


On a 9" X 12" piece of heavy white paper or card stock, have the children begin adding stripes and swirls in a horizontal fashion. I told them it was like the wind blowing back and forth.


In this photo, you can see how we handled the sharing of the paint. I would set a cup with brushes in it on the table and give them a minute or two to paint. Then, I would move the cups, rotating the colors around the room. This way, the brushes don't have to be washed after every use and you don't have to mix up more than one cup of each color. Also, the paint moves rather than the student, so there are no accidents with wet bru…

Sharing some photos I snapped in my room this past week. Enjoy!

Tonight, I had a fun evening with my neice, Madi. I was asked to babysit and she told her dad, my brother, that we were going to make some really cool stuff, so the pressure was on to find some projects she would enjoy.


We made two seperate projects; Sparkly Fall Trees & Printed Pumpkin Note Cards.



To make the Sparkly Fall Trees, we began coating the background and then using warm colored acrylics to add a swirling sky to our 11" X 14" cavases (found at Big Lots for $5.)



Then, we used the back end of the brush dipped in the paint to add some dots to the swirls.

We practiced painting our trees on newspaper before doing the following steps.

Next, we used black paint to add a fall tree, starting with the trunk, as shown below.


The trunk is broken in half, like a Y and then the ends of those branches are broken in half.



This is an easy way to show young artists how to paint a tree.




The branches keep getting separated in to V shapes and get longer and thinner as they get higher. …