Holly's Arts and Crafts Corner: Great Art Book Series & A Collage Project

Irene Luxbacher has created an absolutely wonderful series of books for kids and parents called the Starting Art Series. I came across these books this week while at the library with my toddler. They are PERFECT for introducing art concepts to children, especially if you do not have any kind of art background at all. Very elementary, yet fun! I picked up four of the six books in the series while I was at the library and I LOVE every one of them!

I took some photos of the inside so you can get a feel for what they are like:

The first page of each book, shows the projects you can find in it. And gives a one or two sentence blurb defining that particular medium of art.

Each project page shows step by step how to create the project and a larger view of the finished product.

The last page of the book has tips for parents and teachers for further projects and how to make art time fun. There is also a list of the art words used for that medium as a sort of index.

I REALLY liked the painting book. If you need any help at all teaching color theory! This is a great companion. There is a project for warm/cool colors, one for complementary colors, for tones (light and dark within one color), different brush techniques. FABULOUS!

The same day I brought these books home, my older daughter had some friends over and my younger daughter asked if she could do an art project to give her something to do while they played. I told her, "Of course!" So I showed her the fish project in the collage book because I knew I could easily come up with the supplies for it.

The instructions told her to make a banana shape for the fish's body. HA! She asked me if she could trace around a banana. :-)

You could make this project as easy as you like or add in more skills if you want it to take longer or have your child practice cutting. For the easy method, use circle scrapbook punches to create your circle shapes. For the more challenging method, have your child use a circle stencil to draw various sized circles or they can draw them freehand. Then have them cut all the circles out. We used a combination of these. I had a larger circle punch and we used a stencil for the smaller circles and Lily cut them out.