Week 27: Self Portrait in pencil

This is one of those projects that can be repeated several times a year and be a window into your child's world at that moment.  At the begining of the year I had the kids do a self portrait in torn colored paper.
September's self portrait lesson

Come Spring, its time to revisit, but with a different medium, and a different lesson.  Kids naturally like to draw, but they also naturally do not have a good idea of how to draw an accurate face.  So in this lesson I gave the kids a soft pencil, eraser, and mirror along with some nicer paper.

On the baord I drew a step-by-step face starting with a large circle, then a middle line and lines for eyes, nose, moith etc. Then a tutorial on the various parts of the face.


Here is a real nice You-Tube video of an artist doing just that:
How to draw a a face video

This is a not an easy concept, and kids, no mater how old, still want to draw circles for eyes that are way up on the top of the head and a hooked nose and exaggereated mouth, but if you do it step by step they get the hang of it. Plus doing it every year will help with the practice.



Where they can personlize the drawing is in the shading and air and other details.  The soft pencil is great for smudging and adding realism to the drawing.

Week 26: Easter Egg animals

This was the week before Easter Break, so I had the kids make animals out of eggs. I got the idea from Martha Stewart and other places that used real eggs that had been blown. But we had a bag full of the colorful plastic eggs, and no staff of 10 to blow and dye the 100 eggs I would need!

There are any number of animals you can make out of eggs. The more traditional ones are chicks/ducks from yellow eggs, lambs from pink/orange eggs (with cotton balls), pigs, doves, and bunnies from blue or purple eggs. Then you can make bees from yellow eggs, hippos from purple eggs, bears and puppies from brown eggs, and frogs from green eggs.

All you need is some scrap construction paper, cotton balls, felt, sequins, feathers, permanent markers, pom-poms and any other crafty scraps. We used white glue for some parts, but I would advise hot-glue or tacky-glue.

The kids seemed to really like the idea of this craft, but the younger kids had a bit of a hard time with the glue not sticking fast enough. Overall, a very fun project!