Space Project

Today I am sharing one of my 6 year old granddaughter's effort - her space project for school.   She came up with the idea of what she wanted to do - and her father came up with a way of illuminating it.

This was nearly all her own work.   She made the planets from Hearty Air Dry Clay, and painted them with watercolours following a chart from the internet.  Making them as as realistic in size as she could - though Jupiter and Saturn should be a lot larger in comparison, but had to be realistic with the size of box she was working in (one from her own shoes).  She threaded the planets on some black fishing line (courtesy of a friend of her mother).  She painted the shoe box with black sparkly paint  for the night sky and added a few drops of glue and some and some glitter for even more stars. 

The sun was created from some old packaging, which she paint with clear gesso and alcohol inks.

She needed a little help creating the holder for the torch, which was created from some more packaging; and she needed a little help from her cousin and me to wield the hot glue gun to stick it to the box ..... and to cut the hole in the box with a stanley knife. For safety reasons, I think that is allowed.  (The torch shines through the side of the box and the sun.

Note the rings on Saturn - created by cutting out the shape in clay with two bottle tops!  Also the Earth has its moon (confess an inspiration of mine in the middle of the night to use a map pin - and her aunt came to the rescue with one!)

I hope you agree that she had made a brilliant job of it.

Grandchildren's craft - Air Dry Clay

I had the grandchildren unexpectedly the other day for  couple of hours.   They had been shown how to make roses the previous day by a friend and wanted to show me what they had learned. Out came the air dry clay and some cutters as well, and this is the result of their efforts over a couple of hours.

 

I wasn't too sure about letting them loose with acrylic paints - so they used watercolour paints.   (I did prepare the round plaques with gesso for them, and the black canvas was a prepared black one.)

I gave them a few more hints on how to make the roses (what I call marzipan roses) which are just made by hand.   I think they did very well.

Art Journalling

I am always intending to try some art journaling, but never seem to get around to it.   Well I rectified that today.   MY no2 granddaughter was with me for the day, and as she was busy playing on her x-box, I thought I would try out the new Peerless Designs "face" stencils that arrived in the post.  (I bought them because a) I am useless at drawing faces b) thought they might encourage me to play in my art journal and c) I thought the grandchildren might like using them.).

As it was raining, and I couldn't work outside or up in the Den, I thought I would stick to watercolour painting in the first instance - rather than acrylics, as slightly less messy as I was working on the dining table to keep my granddaughter company.  I also used some luscious powders, a sprinkle of brushos, some Izink ink pads, and a smidgen of starlight paint for the straight lines.   I also used some other stencils from my stash.

The picture on the right will be work in progress when I inspiration strikes me as to what I want to add.  Of course this is the great thing about art journals you can go back to them as and when you want and add more bits.

My granddaughter took a break from her video game and came to see what I was doing.  "Can I have a go please", she asked.  So here is her journal page.    (We were both working in the same journal, so I stopped working on my page for a bit.    I then did some later, and she also then did some more to hers.   She wanted to create an abstract look for hers - so it is quite different from mine.   She has fun with the luscious powders!

I confess I haven't quite got into the "grunge" look of creating pages - I will try though.  Confess I would never have thought of starting with a blue/grey face!

Whilst she was putting the finishing touches to her painting, I was trying to encourage her and tell her about the "Rule of Three" or at least odd numbers, and demonstrated on a little tag I had handy.  Here it is.

We certainly had a fun day - and I am getting ideas of what she might like for Christmas .... could get expensive!   I will keep my eye out for bargains on journals and ink pads etc.

Clay Modelling with the grandchildren, and a visitor's watercolour painting.

 It has been half term week, and I have had the youngest grandchildren here for a couple of days and they wanted to do watercolour painting and clay modelling - so we combined the two.   The first day was spent modelling with air dry clay.

6 yr olds apple with legs and a fairy door

Fairy door

9 year old's "Daddy & BBQ"

12 year old's mermaid on rocks.

This was all their own work (I had been hoping to do something myself, but I was too busy supervising!)  I did get to coat the boards with the texture mediums for the sea and the grass for them, so that they could dry before they got to paint them, and I helped with the initial shaping of the apple, and made suggestions for the painting of the apple.

My Wilton people molds, that I must have had for nearly 40 years came into their own for the heads and bodies, and the Fairy Door was a Sugar Buttons mold.

As I didn't dare risk them painting with acrylics, they used watercolour paints and some goache, which worked quite well  The 12 years old did use some of my metallic Posca pens for the mermaid's tail.

I think they did extremely well.

On the second day, when they were painting, their Aunt (my daughter) called in, and she wanted to try a watercolour painting.  So under my guidance (that's a joke really, as I am only just getting to grips with learning how to do it) she produced her first painting.

Misty Dawn

She wasn't too happy with it, but what a difference when we took the masking tape off - I think it is brilliant for a first effort on linen watercolour paper, with my new Matthew Palmer brushes, and just my guidance.   (At least I had a video recording of a demo to follow when I did mine!)