• Christmas,  shopping

    Artful Advent Ideas

    It has been a long time since I’ve managed to post anything on here. There are lots of personal reasons for this, which I won’t go into here, but with it already approaching the festive season, I thought it was about time added some new, and hopefully useful content. For the last couple of years I have been trying to find the time to establish a proper directory of resources on Artful Kids – it has been something of a stop-start project, but hopefully it is now, finally, starting to take shape. It is a combination of resources already on this site, external resources elsewhere which are free of charge,…

  • Projects

    Get Creative with QR Codes

    I’ve been adding QR codes recently to some of our business stationery and marketing materials, and being struck by their creative potential for hidden ‘secret’ messages and creativity, decided to experiment a bit. QR codes are very easy to create and download, and you can have them link to a webpage, a special photograph or piece of artwork you have uploaded somewhere, or simply reveal a line of text when scanned. When it comes to text, the shorter and simpler the information, the simpler and bolder the QR code created will be. I found that when printed at a reasonable size, the QR code becomes a piece of artwork –…

  • Reviews

    Book Review: Fill in the Blank

    I don’t often do reviews on Artful Adventures, in fact I think it’s been about a year since I last did one, at least in response to a direct invitation. This is partly because I don’t seek such invitations, and partly because those products which I am offered for review are rarely either relevant to my subject matter, or of any interest to me. However this one was different. I am a particular fan of books which encourage creativity, and I especially like the genre of Doodle books which invite you to add to them in some way. It’s not that I don’t like colouring books, which I think have…