The Painting of a Master Piece

I need to start this post off by saying SPOILER ALERT!!!! MOTHER'S DAY PROJECT! Please stop reading if you wish to be surprised.

I am loving the Usborne Art Treasury right now and am in a very big way doing art with your children at the school lately. Earlier in the year we looked a Van Gogh's fourteen Sunflowers and recently we looked at and painted our own Starry Night.

Today, we did more painting. This time on canvases for Mother's Day. I talked with the children about the process and how you can make layers when you are painting. We also talked about blending and how to soften your picture with brush smooshing.

It is easy to get caught up with details when you are a child and you are drawing a picture. I encouraged the children to use a pencil on their canvas first and then to paint over the pencil as the pencil is merely a guide for the paint brush. We looked more closely at our art book and then we got into the business of paint and mixing colors. So much fun today. I helped soften edges and I helped to put flowers and sheep into pictures.

I even had the children squint their eyes to look at the painting so that they could see that even though the sheep did not have a painted face we knew it was a sheep. We talked about how things look far away and up close. We talked about the ocean, storm clouds, hills, forests, flowers and sheep.

I will post some of the paintings when they are finished, after Mother's Day because I want you to be surprised and I know you are reading this because you could not possibly wait to find out what we were doing. I will say this, they are the most beautiful paintings I have ever had the privilege of viewing. It felt like I was at a private art gallery today. That gives me another idea! We should pretend we are at an art gallery later this week so that we may all enjoy this art.