Keepsake Christmas Card
Christmas is getting ever closer, and I thought it must be time to start getting things ready preparing our home-made cards. We alsways need plenty of time for this, and this year is no exception. These days rather than making a whole pile of home-made cards at Christmas time, we’ve got a bit lazier and tend to send out just a few to special friends and relatives – this means we can spend a bit more time on them too, so it’s a little less like a production line and the quality is higher! So for this year’s card me and the kids put together something which can also double…
Children’s Art Temporary Tattoos
Temporary children’s tattoos are undergoing a resurgence of popularity again at the moment, and I thought it might be fun to let the boys create their own tattoos using ink-jet printable tattoo paper This took a bit of tracking down, but eventually I managed to find some. It was easy to use, and the finished product was not only completely unique and personal but also worked really well. I ‘cheated’ a little, in that the artwork the boys produced for the tattoos were just drawings with no colour, so I digitally coloured them in Photoshop first before printing out the tattoos. However this really isn’t necessary, and I…
Experimenting with Oil Pastels
There’s nothing quite like opening a new set of crayons and seeing them laid out all beautiful and pristine ready to use for the first time. I was offered some art materials to test out for Caran d’Ache, and was happy to do so, because although I don’t do a great number of reviews on Artful Adventures, nevertheless good quality free art materials never go amiss, and I genuinely thought I could turn it to use as a piece that would be of interest to readers. For some reason I was expecting pencil crayons to arrive, but what actually turned up was a set of Caran D’Ache Neopastel artists quality…
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Creating Thank You Cards with Kids Artwork
It’s that time again – time to make thank you cards for the Christmas presents the boys received, and get them sent off. I have to say it seems to take us longer and longer to do this every year – but I at least, feel guilty if it’s not done, and it’s not really something I can or should do for them. This year I persuaded my younger son to draw some pictures specially so that I could create some cards from them. This I thought might be easier than expecting them both to make a whole pile of cards, only for them to lose interest half way through,…
Kids Artwork – Choosing what to Keep
It’s a perennial problem – of all the mountains of artwork that young children produce, how much of it should you keep? Maybe you are sufficiently ‘ruthless’ to be able to throw it away without a qualm, but at the other extreme if you are a hoarder like me, you may find it difficult to throw any of it away. There comes a time however when rational decisions have to be made if you’re not to be swamped. But how to make them? It can be difficult to create hard and fast rules here, because what makes something special for one person will be entirely different for another, and ultimately…
Photographing Children’s Artwork
If you want to take photos of your children’s artwork for your own projects, perhaps to create your own cards, or to make a photograph, the quality of the photograph is of huge importance. For this reason, I thought it might be worthwhile offering a few simple pointers to getting the best image you can. After all, not everyone has access to a home scanner, and if the artwork is large, then your average home scanner is not an option. At this point I should make it clear that it’s not necessary to have a super dooper all singing all dancing camera to get a good photograph – these days…
Children’s Art Cards
The summer holidays are over, and the kids are back at school – I will miss the morning lie-ins, but I confess that it’s with something of a sigh of relief that I’ve waved them back to school – at least now I can get on with the huge backlog of tasks that have lain undone for weeks while they were off. Their childhood is so different from my own. Summer holidays as I remember them were ones where we were left almost totally to entertain ourselves, whereas now I seem to be my children’s entertainment manager. So I have a huge backlog of arty activities we’ve been busy with…
Children’s Artwork Bunting Mural
Yet another way of using some of the piles of children’s artwork that you can accumulate, this is a cheap and easy way to add some colour to a child’s room, using their own artwork. I’ve been meaning to do this project for weeks now, because my elder son’s room has never been properly decorated as a child’s room should be. Not that it appears to have bothered him in any way – he seems to be one of those people (frequently male) who have a complete unconcern for the environment he lives in. When I completed the project, I didn’t tell him, but left it as a surprise. It…
Quality Counts
I recently had to buy some new supplies of tempera paint. I couldn’t find the Reeves brand I had used before, so I bought some own-brand paint from a large store. It was a little cheaper, but turned out to be a false economy. It got me thinking about the art materials we give our children to use, and how this might affect their experience, so I decided to road test a few to see what the differences really were, if any. To begin, I compared what I had left of the Reeves tempera paint, with the new paint I bought. As you can see from the results below, the…
Creative Gift-wrapping
Following on from my last post on creating some Graffiti Giftwrap, I thought I’d look at a few more ideas for some creative gift-wrapping with kids. Of course there are loads of ways you can create gift wrap. The following are just a few ideas: Last year we made decorative paste papers for gift wrapping, We also had a go last year at using cookie cutters to stamp out decorative papers and cards. This can also look good on a standard brown packaging paper background, especially if you use some gold paint. There are lots of seasonal cookie cutters about such as simple stars and Christmas trees, and this makes…
Scanner Art
Some of us may have fond memories of photocopying parts of our anatomy in the office in days gone by (do people still do that?), but the fun and games don’t end there, as the humble domestic scanner is an important piece of art equipment these days. You’ll often see scanned textures used in children’s book illustrations to give added texture and depth and create a ‘collage’ effect – in fact if you have any suitable books which use the technique, playing ‘spot the scanned in texture’ is a game that you can play alongside this activity) but even without the additional digital manipulation often involved in mixed media illustrations,…
Creating Splat Monsters
This is a really simple, yet fun activity which is a great way for kids to exercise their imagination and can result in some fabulous artwork. There are no doubt numerous different ways in which you might create your monsters, but I chose to create my ‘splat monsters’ by dribbling several different colours of tempera paint onto paper. You can also tilt the paper about if you wish to move the paint and give yourself more ‘control’, but this isn’t really necessary. The ‘splat’ is then created by placing another piece of paper over the paint and pressing down – the amount of pressure you use, and how you move the…
