Monday 23 September 2013

Artists That Will Enhance Your Children's Creativity

By Kate Halfey


It is often difficult for many children to come up with ideas for art projects. While there is certainly no wrong style of art, we often see children, when left to their own devices, creating drawings of images with which they are quite familiar, such as a local park, a favorite pet or a family portrait. To further enhance your child's creativity, show them the works of famous artists and a range of styles that will inspire them to think outside the box.

For many kids, it is easiest for them to draw, paint and color pictures that are fairly realistic, but it can be fun to introduce them to familiar scenes painted in less realistic ways. Impressionism and Post-Impressionism are two styles of art that look somewhat realistic yet are somewhat different. You can show your child how to mimic the brush strokes of an artist such as Seurat or even download a printable mural of one of his works from a website like ArtProjectsForKids.org. This site breaks down famous works of art into manageable sections which you color and then reposition like a puzzle, and you end up with a work of art very similar yet different from the original. Other artists to consider include Vincent Van Gogh and Claude Monet.

Some painters wanted to encourage people to look at the world a little differently and painted dream-like works that fall under the art style of surrealism. Among the notable names in this category are Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte and Joan Miro. Miro provides a fun and easy opportunity for children's art. Take a look at some of his seemingly simple works that contain just straight lines and circles. Have children draw a stick figure with circles on a paper and color the circles and intersecting areas all different colors. For Magritte, recreate his famous his famous work "Son of Man," and have children create a person with a body and no face. Instead of a face, ask them to replace the body part with a food item or another significant object. This could even be the basis of a cool self portrait and kids can explain why they chose to replace the face with a certain food or item.

Abstract art projects can be a lot of fun and offer children a way to really express their emotions. Artists such as Delauney and Pollack fit into this category, and you can plan fun art projects around both of these painters. For Jackson Pollack, lay down a tarp outside, place a canvas or large paper down on the tarp and let children experiment with splashing, dripping and flinging paint onto the blank paper. This can be done on white paper or consider using very vivid colors on black or gray paper. They can also splatter and use their fingers to create squiggly lines or even place the paper in a box, dip marbles into paint and roll them around. For a project featuring Sonia Delauney, show children a few of her works and then let them experiment with painting different circles in multiple colors.

While we often think of art as something just for a museum wall, it is truly all around us. Have children look at advertisements in magazines, packages of food products and even comic books. All of these have been created and designed by someone, and all can serve as objects of art. Pop artists such as David Hockney and Andy Warhol certainly thought so, as did Roy Lichtenstein. A fun Pop art project could include a combination of Warhol and Hockney. Have children find a full-page advertisement from a magazine. Tear out this page and cut into pieces, strips or squares. Glue the pieces onto a paper or canvas in the original order, but move them so that they overlap a bit or tilt a tiny bit to give a slightly odd view.

No matter what type of project you decide to do, the main goals are always to have fun and also to learn about many types of art. By exposing your children to many styles, they see that the only limit to art is the limit of their imagination.




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