With the Kids: Painting Complementary Colors

Most of the time my kids get to work on paper, but occasionally, they get to do a special project on canvas. (Read: VERY BIG deal for them)

On paper, if they totally disregard whatever it is that we are doing, I'm okay with that. But on canvas, I try to keep them a little more on task. A bunch of canvas that end up brownish-gray is not too fun.

One of the ways I try to keep them on task is to give them a limited color palette. In this case, we were working with blues and blues complement, orange. They had a choice to paint water and boats or water and orange fish. Both of my kids chose to paint boats (I guess they take after me). We did this project with a friend who painted fish, but I forgot to take a picture of his painting.

The other technique that the kids were starting to learn here was how to gradually change the color of the blue paint using white. You can see in my daughter's painting (5 yrs old) that the water lightened as it went down the canvas.

Art with the Kids

My son told me that he doesn't like art at school because the teacher wants him to be clean and neat. He also said that she is only letting them use markers and crayons and not paint. I don't know if this stems from the mess or teachers having to buy their own supplies, but I wanted to give my son a chance to express himself with paint and mixed media. So, here are some of the projects that my kids 5 & 7 yrs old have been working on.

I followed the much-pinned tutorial for creating this flower & sun scene. A round sponge is used for the sun with yellow & white paint. A q-tip is used to create the flowers.

Over the summer, we went the the Dali museum in Florida. (http://www.tampabay.com/news/humaninterest/hair-raising-experience-at-the-dal237-museum/2189986)
So, in studying surrealist art, we did some collages, mainly set around Magritte's work. Putting things that don't belong together.