Spooky Trees

Hi all, this is an old post from Oct 2013, no idea why it's reposted now yet I don't really want to delete it so please scroll down for my latest post - chalk pastel landscapes......

 It was Halloween week at Sunnyside Art House a few weeks ago (yes I am rather behind in posts...)

 the studio ready for Halloween lessons

In our lesson we did the Spooky Tree's paintings below.  We also did some "witches legs" paintings which I will post about next.  To complete the lesson we made spider and ghost lollypops and coloured in some Halloween masks.

I have been wanting to do some blow paintings for a while yet when I tried a sample a while back it didn't work that well.  This time I tried a few different paints and used different consistencies.  I have to say the paint consistency is very important.  If its too thick the children will have difficulty blowing it around.  If its too thin it tends to soak into the paper before you blow it around.  I'm sorry I dont have exact ratios to give you as it depends on your paint, just be prepared to test it out until it seems about right.

The spooky trees idea is from my Usborn Art Book.  It required an orange painted background though and I really wanted to do this in one lesson.  I then spied a pin (sorry I can no longer find) on Pinterest using a charcoal background and painted black trees. Perfect!  A quick charcoal background is perfect to enable this lesson to be done in only about 30 mins. It also looks great.  With a little smudged charcoal on our faces we looked like we were in costume already...

What you need:

• A3 cartridge paper
• charcoal
• Watered down black paint (I used acrylic)
• straws
• plastic spoon

How to:

• Demonstrate how to draw a big moon shape (this can be anywhere on the page) with the charcoal
• Use the side of the charcoal stick to lightly colour the sky around the moon.  
• With your fingers smudge in the charcoal
• Ask each child to point on their page where they would like their tree
• Place a spoonful of black paint on their paper where indicated
• Pass them a straw and ask them to blow a tree shape
• They may ask for another blob of black paint for a second or third tree if they wish

The Results:

Spooky trees by 5 to 9 year olds

Cheers
Fiona