Liv and I recently made a cardboard castle and had so much fun. I got the idea from The Artful Parent. They have a fantastic newsletter and always send out ideas that I feel like we can do with basic supplies (even better we could recycle our cardboard boxes and toilet paper rolls for this project). I bought a pack of Kwik Sticks (tempera paint in a stick form-dries almost instantly), but unfortunately when I spray painted the cardboard the kwik sticks wiped off (?) We ended up using them on some of the side pillars, but then grabbing our basic acrylics to paint the rest. The kids have loved playing with it!!
Some of our favorite things
Slick Stix !! These are awesome—they glide really easily for little kids and the colors are bold. Fun to draw on black paper, too. We like to use the slick sticks & Crayola oil pastels on top of watercolors (pictured above). Liv, always picking the best color combos.
Drawing with Ed Emberely
Liv and I have done a bunch of different art projects this past spring that I wanted to share. Thankfully, she likes doing art together (making my childhood dreams of doing art with my kids come true!) :)
One of our favorite artists and teachers is Ed Emberely. I loved all his illustration work even before I had kids and now we really enjoy checking his children’s books out at the library. While it’s nice to have a hard copy and turn the pages of a book all of his drawing pages are ONLINE too, which is awesome to find pictures quickly of animals or objects you want to draw.
Art with kids YouTube
During quarantine, I discovered two fun YouTube channels for drawing: Brittany Jepsen of The House That Lars Built and Super Simple Draw on Amazon Prime (recommended by Austin Kleon). House of Lars did a whole drawing challenge featuring 31 different flowers. Using YouTube makes the activity feel extra special for Liv because she’s watching a “show” and it’s really fun to do together. They also help teach how to draw different shapes and follow simple directions.
We’ve started to use an old drop cloth to cover the table/floor for art projects and it’s been a game changer! It cuts down on clean up and really sets the scene to make a little bit of a mess, wipe your fingerprints off on the cloth, rub a stamp or paintbrush off etc…seems like an obvious thing to have on hand with kids and keeping it in the pantry with all our art stuff has made a big difference.