Summertime Art

I’ve been travelling quite a bit this summer and I wanted to take easy, portable art supplies with me so I’ve been grabbing the watercolor paints and crayons.

Turns out kids love these “magical crayons” as much as I do.  It’s easy to make some fun, vibrant art like the photo above.

You can sketch out whatever comes to you (we used Pitt pens) or you can just draw patterns or shapes with the crayons themselves. You’ll want to use a heavy paper that has some absorbency.  We used watercolor paper.

Then whip out your box of magical crayons-we use Staedtler watercolor crayons

They look like your average, old dollar-store crayons but they have secret powers

Just use them to color in your sketch-you can combine different colors for highlighting and variation.  Here I used green, yellow and blue.

Then take a brush and some water and begin blending. (My daughter is in love with the travelling watercolor brush-as am I.  It’s self cleaning!)

And that’s all there is to it.  Just coloring and painting with water.  A perfect project for a summer’s day.

Here’s my daughter’s work that she made during some down time in the Adirondack Mountains.

Wouldn’t these make sweet greeting cards for the grandparents?

Inspired Design

I love it when creativity runs wild.

My Daughter's Design's inspired by a trip to Hobby Lobby

This weekend my daughter and her friend were at Hobby Lobby with me and they wandered into the fabric section...

They started pouring over fabrics, especially the satins and taffeta and talking excitedly about the possibilities of what they could make....

(mind you we've never made clothes, don't have a sewing machine, but hey, when you're 11, everything is possible!)

When we got to the car, they asked me for paper to start sketching out their designs.  They kept shouting "lightbulb!" every time a new idea came.  They were getting really fired up!

As soon as we got home they busted out the color and began to really lay their ideas out.  This was several hours of entertainment and lasted a couple of days.

They even made up a game:  "The Aguellera Dress Shop."  They would pretend to get a call from a customer and design a dress the customer wanted.  Then, the customer would come into the store to look at the dress and come back for fittings.  They had another friend join the game as the secretary who would take calls and write down what people wanted, their name and phone number.

I love this kind of pure creativity.  It wasn't facilitated by me or anyone else.  It was just spontaneous fun.  They followed something that sparked an idea, went with it and had a blast!