The Messy Art Studio

What I love best about blogging is how we stay connected and share new ways to have fun with art. It’s so refreshing to know there are other “like minded” spirits out there. I always have fun with messy art, especially the kind of OUTRAGEOUS fun you see in this photo, sent to me by a fellow arts educator, Donna Bernstein.

Donna owns The Messy Artist, an art studio for children in New Jersey. She recently sent me a blog comment, so I looked up her website and I found it over-the-top inspirational. Just the name of her art business was enough to make me smile. Donna enrolls over 150 students a month in her afterschool art classes and delivers 15 Messy Art Birthday Parties a month. What a creative and successful entrepreneur! She must have boundless energy and a very happy staff. Imagine all those happy children and families, being exposed on a regular basis to the pleasures and values of sensory play.

To promote the VALUE of messy art, Donna highlights these words on her website:
Exciting, exploratory, creative, imaginative, fabulous, just plain fun.

Kudos to you, Donna, that pretty much sums it up. The ideas and the photos from The Messy Artist studio were so much fun, I knew you would enjoy seeing them too.

Check out these two boys messing around with Colorations® Liquid Watercolor™ on top of shaving cream. Donna was excited to tell me that she buys all her art supplies from Discount School Supply® and first learned a lot of her messy art ideas from our catalog. Everything here is written up as a Lesson Plan in Smart Art Ideas Activity Book and Smart Art Ideas 2.

This larger photo shows the group process at a Messy Art Birthday Party. Donna says when older siblings come to a birthday party, they sometimes have even more fun with the sensory play than the little ones! She went on to share her ideas about art in society: “In today's society where children are so structured and pushed to grow up it's great to see them just being kids and playing with goop, slime or finger paint.”

Here’s some orange colored Sensational Spaghetti in a large sensory tub, one of the Messy Artist’s signature projects. You’ll find the lesson plan in Smart Art, but here’s a copy (click here for the pdf) of it for you to see and print out.

Now check out this Sensory Box that Donna keeps filled with colored rice; it’s like a sandbox but for indoor use. Donna pre-colors rice with Colorations® Liquid Watercolor™ and keeps her sensory box filled with it. It’s the hit of her studio! Donna found that outdoor sand boxes typically don't have a strong bottom or cover, so she had her husband make this to her specifications. It’s 4' x 4' with a bench all around for kids to sit on. It's also big enough for kids to sit inside. It can accommodate about six kids inside and 8-10 if they are sitting around it.


The full-on body contact with colored rice and the sensations of this total body immersion are unforgettable. In fact, Donna says as children grow up, leave home and come back to visit her studio, they always first ask if she still has the colored rice to sit in!

Donna’s photos inspired me to make colored rice and spaghetti at my next conference, so I opened up my sensory collage box. There I discovered some colored rice I had forgotten about, I made it over two years ago! That’s some pretty good “shelf life.” I kept it because I loved this color combination, I even called it “mardi gras” rice. I colored it with lime, black, red, violet and magenta Colorations® Liquid Watercolor™. I always color some rice with black Colorations® Liquid Watercolor™ because black gives such good contrast against the bright colors. And for the same reason, I throw in a little plain white.

To make this multi-colored, “mardi gras” rice, simply take dry rice and place it in different plastic zip lock bags, and make up each color separately. Pour, drizzle or spray Colorations® Liquid Watercolor™ into the bag, shake it up, then pour it all out on a paper plate to dry. When the rice colors are dry, mix them together like the mardi gras mix, then keep other colors pure for use in various types of collage.

Getting back to the colored spaghetti: The night before my conference I cooked up 3 boxes of differently shaped pasta, and stored them in large zip lock bags. Here you see them in my favorite sensory tub heading for their travels. If you don’t have good sensory tubs, try these! They are wonderful. I use mine constantly and they last for years.

Here we are at the San Diego Association of Family Child Care, where I just delivered a Colorations® Liquid Watercolor™ workshop. The crowd was mesmerized! But of course they were, how often does a speaker bring out 3 pounds of pasta and begin coloring it?

I showed everyone how to place rice or pasta into a zip lock bag, add Colorations® Liquid Watercolor™, shake it up to distribute the color, then pour it out. We poured the rice out onto paper plates, but we poured the wet pasta into the sensory bins. Here we have a bag of wet rigatoni colored with magenta, followed by other wet pasta shapes colored with lime. Are we crazy? Perhaps, but it sure was fun!

By the way, one final note about coloring foods. If you work in a low income area, it’s not a good idea to use food as an art material for obvious reasons. In that case, try substituting ice cream salt, plain wooden beads, or shaving cream, they work just fine!

Contact Donna or check out her website at:
Donna Bernstein
Owner and Director
The Messy Artist, LLC
www.TheMessyArtist.com
973.378.2425

Materials Used:
Sand and Water Activity Tubs (TUBS)
Colorations® Liquid Watercolor™ - set of 13 classic colors (13LW)
Smart Art Ideas - both books (ARTY) Paint'M Beads (PAINTM)

* Brought to you by Discount School Supply®

* For more ideas, visit Art and Creativity in Early Childhood Education

I Love, Love, Love COLOR!

It’s officially Spring so let’s celebrate COLOR! 

I think color is the most fun part of art.  Do you adore brilliant colors, too? 

How about these huge coffee filters painted with Colorations®Liquid Watercolor™? Aren’t the colors inviting? 

There’s nothing like Liquid Watercolor™ to bring colors to life.     

The pigments are amazingly intense, and they are so easy to drip, spray or dab on with a “bingo bottle.”  Plus they are washable, affordable, and just about the most versatile paint on the planet.

Here’s a photo of a recent conference where we painted Texas-sized coffee filters with Colorations® Liquid Watercolor™ and sprinkled them with salt to create Salt Crystal Coffee Filters. What’s not to LOVE about this easy and playful art idea? 

Get your Salt Crystal Coffee Filter Lesson Plan here!

Young children can safely explore color using Colorations®Liquid Watercolor™.  This 4-year-old girl is exploring magenta.  She’s lucky enough to be in Francine Farkas’s class, where they do open ended art every day!  Here are two more of Francine’s students, dripping Liquid Watercolor™ onto White Canvas Backpacks (BACKPACK) using special eyedroppers called Super Safe Plastic Droppers (12SSD).  Notice how engaged they are in the painting process. Their sheer concentration speaks to the value of child-centered, self-directed art.  Experienced teachers know how important it is to provide paint and other unstructured, fluid art materials daily.  Wet or fluid art materials like these provide exciting physical contacts that motivate exploration and provide children with an almost magical sense of discovery.

Here are some Liquid Watercolor™ paintings on Real Watercolor Paper (PMONET) with salt sprinkled on while the paint is still wet.  The same paint is also applied to a long piece of paper towel.  Can you see the textures created by the salt?  Always apply salt to WET Liquid Watercolor™ and as it dries, the crystal patterns (little dots and textures) will appear.

By the way, sometimes I put Nancy™ Paint Bottle Classic Tips (NANCLS) on top of my bottles.  They fit perfectly and make it easier to control the pour. 

This last Coffee Filter Art came from a workshop participant at the recent CAEYC conference. Can you believe this beautiful Mountain Sunset and Abstract Portrait were both made with Texas-sized coffee filters painted with Colorations® Liquid Watercolor™ then cut up into these wonderful collages?  My jaw dropped when I saw these photographs!  They are so sophisticated, I am still completely in awe of the creativity it took to make them.  Imagine these materials are exactly the same ones used in other coffee filter applications shown in this post.  They were made by Bonnie Reid, an early childhood educator who simply asked me to tell you “I love liquid watercolor!”  Thank you, Bonnie, you’re  awesome.  I am so inspired by you!

I recently read a quote by Jonathan Adler who said “I love, love, love color – it’s the ultimate anti-depressant.”  I think I have to agree. 

I hope your Spring is off to a colorful start!  Thanks for reading this post, and please come back again soon.

Materials Referenced:

Liquid Watercolor™ Texas Snowflakes (BIGTEX)
Colorations® Liquid Watercolor™ (LW18)
Colorations® Ultimate Liquid Watercolor™ Paint Kit (LWKIT3)
Super Safe Plastic Droppers (12SSD)
White Canvas Backpacks (BACKPACK)
Smart Art Ideas Activity Book (SMARTART)
Nancy™ Bottle Classic Tips (NANCLS)
Real Watercolor Paper (PMONET)

* Brought to you by Discount School Supply®

* For more ideas, visit Art and Creativity in Early Childhood Education

Enchantment Boxes

I've been testing out art ideas for my CAEYC workshop next week, and have fallen in love with our new Mini Geometric Papier-Mache Boxes (GEOBOX). At first I was shocked at how small they were, but then I realized small can be an asset (think tooth fairy box, ring box, and the old saying “big things come in small packages”). Aren’t they fun? They combine perfectly with Colorations® Liquid Watercolor™ and Colorations® Lightweight Air-Dry Putty (WPUTTY), but you could color or paint them any way you want. The white papier-mache surface is so tactile, it will accept just about any paint or collage material. I recommend my test version of this project for children 5 and up, and the simpler seashell versions for preschoolers. Both are lovely, creative, inexpensive, and make a great gift.

In addition to playing with the mini boxes myself, I sent some to my CAEYC co-presenter, Danielle Monroy who owns Creative Care for Children in Santa Barbara. She tested them with her preschool children who had a great time with them as well. Danielle also used Colorations® Liquid Watercolor™ but her preschoolers painted it on with a brush (whereas I sprayed on the Colorations® Liquid Watercolor™). Both painting and spraying work nicely, but painting is easier for the very young. Danielle’s children collected their own sea shells and glued them on top. (They have the good fortune of living near the ocean, but you could collect colorful pebbles, small pinecones, or other tiny objects from your own natural environment). I loved her sea shell idea, so I ordered small sea shells and used them my boxes too. You could also finish off with rhinestones for a little “bling.”

  

Here’s a photo of what I used for the school age version of the “Enchantment Boxes.” The Colorations® Lightweight Air-Dry Putty gives them so much interest and dimension. If you haven’t yet tried Air-Dry Putty, I cannot recommend this unique material highly enough. Colorations® Lightweight Air-Dry Putty is similar to Crayola® Model Magic® Modeling Clay (BMM), but more affordable. Both materials give children a wonderful tactile experience and offer a 3-dimensional art experience that’s very different from play dough or clay. It’s great for coiling and making texture impressions. You can use it with clay tools, kitchen tools, stamps or stamping sticks, and rubbing plates. It’s stretchy and so lightweight that feels like a magical marshmallow, but it doesn’t stick to your hands. Children do love it, and you can keep the price down by giving them a small amount (about the size of a ping pong ball per child) and having them use it as a 3-D relief material on top of papierpmache, wood, or other 3-D objects like picture frames or masks.

To begin with the Colorations® Lightweight Air-Dry Putty, give each child about the size of a small ping-pong ball as pictured here. Have the children experience the texture, pull it and play with it to explore its elasticity, then ask them to practice coiling it into little “snakes” and wrapping their coils into a circle. It sticks to itself so the coil will create a little snail shape easily. This practice and experimentation gives children the ability to discover things on their own, and also provides the structure for how to create a small 3-D shape that they will be able to glue down onto the top of their box before painting it. The flower imprint shown here illustrates a stamping stick impression. Colorations® Easy-Grip Super Stamping Sticks (STICKS) are the perfect size for imprinting Air-Dry Putty for these mini boxes. 

Before painting, be sure to glue your finished air-dry putty design on top of your box using simple white glue. You do not have to wait for the glue to dry to begin painting. I used Colorations® Liquid Watercolor™ in our small spray bottles, (again, best for children 5 and up). Practice with the spray bottles yourself first and teach your children how to spray from a distance (8 to 12 inches away from the project) to achieve a light “splatter paint” effect. Use a few different colors and spray from different angles to create secondary colors. 

Here’s a visual review of the coiling technique, the amount of Air-Dry Putty to give each child, a fork used for texture and the result of a stamping stick impression. The close-up shows you how beautiful small sea shells are when glued on top at the very end. 

These enchanting little boxes make a great gift and they cost just 50 cents a piece. Don’t forget to plan ahead for Mother’s Day or any other special occasion on your horizon. Thanks for reading this new post. Please share it with friends and colleagues so we can keep the creative ideas flowing between us. I hope you’ll do something creative today, and remember that creativity exists more in the searching than the finding.

Materials Used:

Mini Geometric Papier-Mache Boxes (GEOBOX)

Colorations® Liquid Watercolor™ (BIGLWS)

Colorations® Super Lightweight Air-Dry Putty in White (WPUTTY)

(or) Crayola® Model Magic® Modeling Clay (BMM)

Colorations® Easy-Grip Super Stamping Sticks (STICKS)

Small Sea Shells (SMSS)

Spray Bottles (SPRAYS)

Colorations® Tacky Glue (GLUEIT)

* Brought to you by Discount School Supply®

* For more ideas, visit Art and Creativity in Early Childhood Education

"Shrink Art" for Valentine's Day

I love Shrink Art and my children have a long history of making shrink art at home with friends. If you’ve never worked with “shrink art plastic” but you’re in the mood for something new, you’ll find it’s a creative, open-ended craft based on children’s original drawings. It’s also super cheap to make, full of magical properties, and it’s loads of fun for children of all ages. Valentine's Day is coming up and it’s perfect for that or any other special occasion, especially considering the material is such a bargain at 15 cents a project.

Shrink art plastic needs adult supervision, since you need to bake it in a standard kitchen oven for 3 minutes. Classroom teachers often take the whole set of finished projects home and bake them at their convenience over the weekend, returning the finished projects the following week. Once you get into practice you can bake 8 or 10 projects at a time, so this phase should not take you long. During the baking process, the projects transform to less than half their original size and take on a nice, thick density, thus the “shrink” part. Here you see baked and unbaked samples.

Children as young as 3 can have fun with this craft, since it’s an art form based on drawing. Young adults will enjoy it too, like my friends Emily and Maya who came by my house this weekend for a visit. This craft really does span all ages and ability levels, and it’s very motivating for both children and adults to watch the process of transformation. 

Shrink-It Sheets (SHRINKIE) comes in a set of 24 opaque sheets for $14.59 with a clear, easy to follow instruction sheet. I prefer the opaque style sheets (they come in “clear” as well - CSHRINK) because colored pencils show best on the opaque version. 

You’ll prepare the plastic first by lightly sanding the surface and cutting each full size sheet into quarters (thus making 96 projects out of 24 full sized sheets). 

Now the fun part begins. Here’s what you’ll do. 

Step 1: Make a line drawing using a fine line permanent marker (SHARPULT). You can draw directly on the plastic or draw on paper first then trace your drawing onto the plastic. 

Step 2: Color your drawing with Colorations® Regular Colored Pencils (COLORP).

Step 3: Trim the edges and hole punch (OHP) the top, so you’ll have a place to hang it from.

Step 4: Bake it in the oven for 3 minutes at 300 degrees. Both Steps 3 & 4 are shown in this last photo (before and after baking). 

 

Here I’m putting a Valentines design into my toaster oven where I’ll leave it for 3 minutes until it shrinks. I much prefer using a standard sized oven and baking 8 or 10 projects on a cookie sheet all at once, but a toaster oven will work in a pinch.

Lastly, here’s a page of “practically professional” shrink art designs to inspire you, created by my daughter Lillie who began with shrink art at about age four and continued until she was eight. When Lillie was a little girl, she absolutely loved to draw and she drew all the time, it was her passion. I’m sure you know children like that too. Shrink Art is the perfect craft for the child who loves to draw.

If you really get carried away with this craft like we did, you’ll find other applications like mounting them in these small wooden frames with a poem or some dictations. This makes them even fancier and adds about a dollar per project. These wooden frames are painted with Colorations® Liquid Watercolor so the wood grain shows through.

I hope you’ll add Shrink Art to your repertoire of arts and crafts ideas for both classroom use and for play dates at home. It certainly added a lot of pleasure and creativity to my home as our children were growing up. Oh, and one last thing: Shrink Art “charms” stand the test of time because they don’t break or wear out so your children’s creativity will essentially last forever.  Now that’s something to write home about. 

Materials You Will Need:
Shrink-It Sheets (SHRINKIE)
Sharpie® Ultra Fine Point Black Markers (SHARPULT)
Colorations® Regular Colored Pencils (COLORP)
One Hole Punch (OHP)
Wooden Standing Frames (WDFRM)
Colorations® Liquid Watercolor (13LW)

* Brought to you by Discount School Supply®

* For more ideas, visit Art and Creativity in Early Childhood Education

The Fine Art of Scribbling

Children’s scribbles were once conceived of simply as practice for “real drawing,” but educators today recognize that scribbling is an important step in child development. Scribbling is the foundation of artistic development and is intimately linked with language acquisition. Young children love to scribble and adults will enjoy it too, if you give them permission to “let loose with a crayon.” So, as I pondered what to address in my first post of 2012, it seemed like a good idea to start at the beginning – with the scribble stage.

Scribbling reflects a child’s physical and mental process. This young girl is scribbling with one of my favorite early learning tools, a Colorations® Smooth and Silky Art Stick (SILKYSTK).  Colorations® Silky Sticks are great for toddlers because they’re easy to grasp and make exceptionally smooth, bright marks on paper. When toddlers first pick up a crayon and make a mark, they experience a pleasurable moment in which they use a tool and produce a result. They don’t realize they are taking the first step of a long journey, a journey that will culminate around the age of 8 with a mastery of line that is remarkably controlled. They only know that in this powerful moment, something they did with their body created a visible result and that feels very exciting.

This scribble drawing is from Mona Raoufpour’s 4 year old classroom at Pressman Academy in Los Angeles. Mona artfully links children’s early drawings to language and literacy. Early in the school year, many of her students are immersed in the scribble stage or just moving into more representational drawings. Mona takes meticulous dictations and mounts them directly onto children’s scribble drawings as shown here. Without this detailed dictation, who would ever know that Noah, this young artist, has a story in his mind about a “big monster who ate broccoli then fell down and broke his face and arm and leg.” 

Mona has her 4 year olds work on long term book making projects that include scribble drawings with dictations. Children are indeed natural storytellers, and scribbling is how their visual story telling begins.

No study of scribbling would be complete without mention of Rhoda Kellogg. Kellogg was a pioneer in the study of analyzing children’s art. Over the course of 20 years, Rhoda Kellogg collected and analyzed over 1 million children’s drawings from children ages 2-8. In 1967, she published an archive of 8000 drawings of children ages 24-40 months, focusing on scribbling and the early “ages and stages” of child development. Kellogg concluded that children need plenty of time for free drawing and scribbling to develop the symbols that will later become the basis for all writing and drawing. Before Kellogg, scribbles were considered nonsense. Children were discouraged or even forbidden from scribbling, and encouraged to copy adult models (sounds ghastly and misguided, but this shows how far we’ve come in understanding child development.).

Stages of Scribble
Here's something creative to do with scribble drawings - check out the "Stages of Scribbles" created by children at the Alpert Jewish Community Center in Long Beach, CA. Assistant Director, Alayna Cosores, asked teachers to contribute examples of scribbles and compiled them into an Ages & Stages frame that hangs in their Early Childhood Office. Not only is it colorful and fun to look at, "Stages of Scribble" reminds parents that scribbling is an important process to encourage at home. Why not try something like this in your own center, it costs so little to put together and will provide years of stimulating conversation.

Last but not least, scribbling is not just for kids…it can also be liberating for adults! Scribbling is a physical process that emphasizes freedom of movement. It can help us relax and get into the sensory mode of our bodies as well as the creative, right hemisphere of our brain. With this in mind, I often begin Teacher Trainings with some form of a scribble warm-up. My favorite is a paired up exercise called a “Scribble Chase.”  Click here for the printable lesson plan from my book Smart Art Ideas 2 (MOREART). While the original lesson plan used Colorations® Liquid Watercolor for the top layer, I’ve come to enjoy it even more using Colorations® No-Drip Foam Paint. (BFPSET).

Scribbling is it’s a great way to energize a room at the beginning of a workshop, and we got beautiful results from the Scribble Chase warm-ups shown here. Both were created by teachers at this week’s Messy Art Workshop, hosted by Beach Cities AEYC at Long Beach City College. I suggest you try “grown-up” scribbling sometime soon. Happy New Year!

Materials Used:
Colorations® Smooth and Silky Art Sticks (SILKYSTK, set of 24, or SILKYPAK, set of 72)
Colorations® Regular Crayons (CRS16)
Colorations® No-Drip Foam Paint (BFPSET, set of 7)
White Sulfite Paper (A80SU)
Smart Art Ideas 2 (MOREART)

* Brought to you by Discount School Supply®

* For more ideas, visit Art and Creativity in Early Childhood Education