Making Origami Paper Boats

We had so much fun making Paper Boats the other weekend.  My daughter then continued to make them all week long.  She tends to find an idea like this and is so proud that she can make it and wants to show off to friends and family.  We got the idea from the book: Curious George Rides a Bikeby H.L. Rey which has the instructions on how to create a paper boat within the story. This activity is great because it ties in reading and art together.

To create a paper boat you'll need:
Origami Paperor thin paper that is easy to fold

Here are the instructions we followed within the book.  It begins with the paper hat.  Here are instructions for the origami paper boat here at: http://www.origami-fun.com/origami-boat.html

We had so much fun with these!

We even did some floating experiments with the origami boats we made too.

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Making Mandalas With Stamps

Do you have lots of pre-made stamps on hand? Well, I have the project for you.  Normally we just stamp on papers without any direction, but recently we came up with the idea of creating mandalas or radial designs with all of our stamps.  They turned out quite beautiful!

To create Mandalas with stamps all you need:

Stamps of all shapes and sizes

Ink Pads

paper in different colors

your imagination

Now,  just start in the middle of the paper and create circles of stamps around your first circle. Basically,  you create a target design of stamps.  Here is a simple stamp mandala.

Get more detailed as you do more.  Try making some stamps closer or further apart. You may even choose to overlap stamps too.

The more stamps and colors the better.

HAVE FUN!

How to Make an Abstract Kandinsky Painting

My daughter was telling me about an art project that she did at school.  She explained a little bit, and right away I guessed she was doing a painting project in the style of abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky. I asked her if she would show me how to create this project.  She was super excited about it and being a former elementary art teacher it excited me too. Keep reading to find out how to create a Gorgeous Kandinsky look-alike painting.

Materials Needed:

white rectangular paper (we used 12x18 white paper)

tempera paint in the primary colors (red, yellow, blue)

brushes/water

mixing tray (we used paper plates)

oil pastels/or chalk

First you fold your paper into 8 sections.  (C told me the teacher did it for her)

Then you start with a dot in the middle of the rectangle spaces and paint around the dot in different colors until you fill up the space.  My daughter told me that the idea was to mix colors with the primary colors.  She absolutely loved the idea of mixing colors just like when we did our Egg Carton Paintings here.

Here are our finished Kandinsky paintings. We added oil pastel over our paintings after they were dry.

Here is Squares and Concentric Circles by Wassily Kandinsky made in 1913. How do you think our paintings compare?

****Our Egg Carton Paintings:http://thechocolatemuffintree.blogspot.com/2012/04/egg-carton-paintings.html