Painting, Drawing and Stenciling on Stones

Let's admit it - we all love a bit of Rock Art!

The children really got into this and I ran a similar lesson in art club with equal success.

First I introduced the children to three artists:

Banksy - for stencil art (and we are looking at Street Art this term).  We loved watching this youtube video of some of his artwork.
Bryan Payne - Produces Doodle stones and then hides them.  The kids so loved this concept. They could write "finders keepers" (or FK for short) on the back of their stones and hide them in my garden at the end of the lesson if they wanted too.  All kids love a bit of a treasure hunt!  Click here for more info on Bryan.
Elspeth McLean - Australian artist who produces the most amazing mandala stones (and paintings) using only dots.  She calls herself a Dotillism Artist.  Check out her work by clicking here for her website and here for a youtube video of her stone work.  Just amazing!

What you need:

• Acrylic Paints (if you want them to keep outside)
• Black Permanent Markers
• Coloured Permanent markers or paint markers (we used Posca).
• Paint brushes and water pots
• Cotton tips and toothpicks
• Stencils

How To:

• Stencilled stones - place stencil on stone, paint, remove stencil
• Doodle stones - draw anything on the stone with permanent markers
• Dot Stones - use cotton tips or toothpicks to create dots all over the stone
• Free choice - use any materials to create anything on the stone..

Some of our Stones:

Cheers
Fiona

Stenciled Sugar Skulls and Black Cats

I love Halloween.  Its always fun to decorate the studio and I love Halloween based art lessons.  This year I also decided to combine the Halloween art lesson with the Day of The Dead (Día de Muertos) holiday as I also love Sugar Skulls.  We talked about both holidays and then set to work.

STENCILED SUGAR SKULLS
We have been talking about the use of stencils in class a bit as one of our themes this term is Street Art (more posts on this to come).  So with much excitement from the children I got out the spray paints and a big tarp (outside on our lawn, a great advantage of my home studio) and showed them how to use spray paint and a stencil.  As expected they loved it and there will be more spray painting to come... I'm thrilled with how these sugar skulls turned out.

What you need:

• Skull stencil
• Black Paper
• Silver Spray Paint (low toxicity)
• Masks
• Pencils, metallic markers etc to decorate with
• Stick on Jewels, Glitter and Feathers (optional).

How To:

• With the children wearing masks and working outside we spray painted the skull onto black paper using the stencil.
• Leave to dry (we painted our cats whilst these were drying)
• Decorate with pencils and markers
• Add jewels and feathers if you wish. I also had small plastic spiders on the table for decoration that some children glued them on as well (with my permission).

The Results:

 BLACK CATS

This art lesson was inspired by this pin by Art Projects for Kids.

What you need:

• Black Liquid Watercolour
• Square White Paper
• Oil Pastels
• Pencils
• Black Permanent Marker

How To:

• Draw Cat face with pencil - remind them to draw it BIG
• Go over with black permanent marker
• Rub out pencil lines
• Colour in eyes and nose with oil pastel.  Ensure they colour in the white of the eye too if they are going to go right over the eyes with paint.
• Paint whole sheet of paper with liquid watercolour.

The Results:

Cheers
Fiona