coffee filter sky

Update: we worked on this more this morning to make all different planets! This technique makes great suns, too.

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This is an idea that came from DLTK crafts for kids — they made a coffee filter planet earth.

We visited the planetarium this weekend and this was a fantastic after-activity. It's a great idea, thanks to DTLK Kids for the idea, which you can see here.

If you draw with felt pens on coffee filter paper and then spray or sprinkle water on your drawing, it gets nice and fuzzy. Perfect for making weather paintings, satellite images or even a collage. This would also be a good way to make a Foggy diorama.

The shape of the filters we have make a natural rainbow shape — cut off the sealed side and bottom and unfold. Cut circles for suns & planets (or just flatten them, if that's the kind of filter you have).

washi tape trains

We've hit some stumbling blocks in the drawing department at our home recently. My son will paint or do sculptures, but drawing (or especially writing) are very frustrating for him. He wants them to look "right" and when they don't he doesn't see the point, really.

We received a set of carte da disegno (drawing sheets) by enzo mari. These packs contain long sheets with drawing of empty train cars, freight ships, zoo cages as well as empty sheets. Partly the subject matter  of this set, combined with the clear drawing structure really launched a lot of drawing activity — it was great. We started with the freight ship and he drew black coal for each barge. Then for the train, he diligently gave each car some cargo — my favourite was the donut car (not pictured). 

When we used up the printed sheets, I made him some more with washi tape. You just need wheels (which, theoretically, your children could draw) and then you make the cars with long pieces of tape. He added some in for the track, too. We had a lot of fun with these and at the end, we also got one completely free-form train (bottom), which was a big step forward.

ringo atelier

Ringo atelier is a creative studio, and resource, for children and their blog is lovely, too. Lots of their drawing activities have a PDF to print out and do at home. They have loads of pages to colour and develop, like this invent the fruit that goes with this leaf, which we tried yesterday during a rainy day

and this construct a city (this one is meant to be for collage, but we painted and scribbled them)

There are also some really great projects that we haven't yet tried, like the à la manière de section, with projects inspired by the work of artists like David Hockney or Sonia Delaunay. I think the David Hockney one is perfect for July, and I will put in a little translation here (find the original project here). Observe water (in your bath, swimming pool, by the sea or edge of a lake...), in the style of painter David Hockney. Have fun trying to reproduce the waves, the reflections, the colour of the water. To do this, use watered-down paint, sponges, tissues and different papers. Look carefully at this painting of a swimming pool (below, left)

The 1 livre—1 book section has a nice library of books, too.

Getting going

I have to get going on the auggie books, so I've picked it up again. You know what is hard to draw? A fire truck. I've been doing some warm-ups with easier things, like rockets.

Hopefully the new blog space will be done in a few weeks. There are lots of projects due in a few weeks, this often happens right before my summer holidays.

2012: the auggie bloggie

One of my resolutions this year (otherwise known as a deadline) is to finish up a new series of books: Auggie in Colourtown, Auggie and the Counting Robot and Auggie's Garage. Every Tuesday I will be posting a new illustration as I work through the books, which are due to be released in September. Here is the Auggie Bloggie.

I will still post Windy-related material here on Saturdays. If we are lucky and find the time, the Little Quick team (Judith and I — we photo-illustrated the Windy books together) will have the chance to photo-illustrate a new series, too. That would be really fun.

Chalk Owls

Please come back, sun. We want to draw more chalk owls.

How to Draw an Owl

This post has been moved.

Making little stickers

This is a very easy, little project. It's so quick, you will have lots of time leftover to go outside and play! You can make your own stickers out of your doodles. If you're not sure what to draw, this is a perfect opportunity to make some Ed Emberley doodles or thumbprint drawings.

Materials
·Unsealed envelopes (maybe you can reuse envelopes from greeting cards you've been given, which are often nice paper and unsealed)
·Pens, pencils or crayons
·Tape (optional)

Directions
Draw a little doodle on the bottom-back of an envelope flap (the sticky part of the envelope has to be on the reverse side of your drawing). Cut out your drawing, preferably in a nice shape, lick back, stick. That's it! If you would like your sticker to be glossy, you can place some clear tape over your drawing before cutting it out (we didn't in these pictures). You should get 8-10 stickers out of an envelope.




We experimented with different surfaces and envelopes to see how well they stayed fast. Stickers stuck very well to uncoated paper, unvarnished wood; medium well to coated paper and poorly to hard surfaces like plastic and stainless steel (they fell off after a few hours).

Have fun!

Colouring page for Sunny

Here is a colouring page from our second book, Sunny.