Creative Cousins

Now that we have moved to our new house and are much closer to family, my sister and I have decided to start a bi-monthly craft/project time with our kiddos. Her daughter is two, and when the cousins get together it is sure to be a fun (and crazy!) time.

On Sunday, we had our first session and decided to try a project from Art for the Very Young. I love this book; it has so many creative ideas for art with young children. The project we chose was a "mono-print collage" in the style of Monet. We each had a copy of A Picnic with Monet
to share with the artists and my sister brought our old copy of Linnea in Monet's Gardenas well.

The project took a bit of time to set up. We had to cut lily pads from tissue paper and mix small amounts of tempera paint with water and honey, all the while trying to keep the kids from sampling the honey (mine), spilling the water (hers), and grabbing paint brushes (everyone).

Finally, everyone was smocked and ready to go!

The first step was to paint the back of cookie sheets with the paints.

Then they gently smoothed a piece of construction paper over the paint, flipped it over, and pressed several lily pads onto their ponds.

The kids enjoyed the project, but we were astonished to see how well the project captured the spirit of Monet's work.

My oldest's had the colors down exactly, which made us laugh since we had been encouraging him to use more paint to more thoroughly cover his cookie sheet. In the end, though, his method worked perfectly and we dubbed him the day's artistic genius!