Art Time! Playing with Colors

My Little Miss loves to paint using her watercolors, but recently I got her to try oil pastels. Actually, she doesn't like them because the smudge her fingers but seeing how bright the colors come out, she soon enjoyed working with them too.

These past art exercises, my eldest joined her and both of them got competitive and worked hard to get the best art work.

Resources

To make it easier for me, I have saved this website, Art Project for Kids, saved on my home screen. They have art exercises categorized per grade level, but there are also some that are tagged for both my Little Miss and Kuya's ages.

They also have fresh contents updated frequently, which gives us lots of ideas to work with.

Blending Colors: Abstract Tree

The idea is to fill lots of closed shapes in an abstract drawing with different colors. Each shape shall have a color in two tones, light and darker shades.

Materials:

• Drawing paper
• black marker
• crayons

Difficulty: Easy

The first step is to draw the tree. The website shows a step by step guide on how to draw this - - basically, draw a slightly curved line at the middle from top to bottom, then other lines that branch outwards.

After drawing the tree, fill in each closed space with colors of your liking. We decided to use the same colors as the reference.

As usual, my kids had to also make me do the exercises. So here's a snap of our work:

Left: Little Miss
Middle: Mommy
Right: Kuya

Easy Pumpkin Drawing

Another easy drawing activity is this pumpkin drawing. It involves easy strokes young kids can make, and also gave tricks on blending the colors to achieve a more 3D look.

Materials:

• Drawing paper
• pencil
• crayons

Difficulty: Easy

Reference

Start by dividing the paper into four parts by lightly drawing horizontally and vertically.

Draw an oblong at the middle, then half oblongs two times at both sides. You now have a pumpkin!

Draw the horizon by drawing a darker line at the middle.

Draw the vines at the lower part of the pumpkin.

Start tracing the drawing to make bolder lines.

Now for the fun part (well, the fun began when you decided to start drawing!), start coloring the lines of the pumpkin with orange. The empty spots will be filled with yellow color.

Do the same with the vine. Color half of the vine with a darker green, then the rest of it with a lighter green tone.

For the sky, fill the upper half with sky blue color. The grass, of course is green.

See our final output below. Can you guess who made which?

Upper Right: My Little Man joined us, but asked if I can make a "tracing" for him. He successfully traced it and for a while Little Miss got worried that he would do better than her. LOL. In the end he did not finish coloring his work. (He says he "hates" coloring).

Lower Right: Kuya is really proud of his work and I conceded when he said he did better than me. He blended the colors nicely, and even added clouds to his sky. Nice work, right?

Lower Left: Little Miss started to get frustrated early on, which is uncharacteristic of her whilst doing arts. She struggled drawing the pumpkin the way she wanted so she started getting grumpy and did not get interested enough to finish coloring.

Upper Left: My work. No more additional comments. Lol.

As much as possible, I also sit down and do the art activities with my children to encourage them more and develop further their love for arts. I know, by constantly doing these exercises and discovering new techniques, they will become better than me. That's the goal! ❤️