Craft Project: Alcohol Ink Tiles Part 3: Mini "Masters" tiles

Working with the alcohol ink sort of reminded me of impressionist paintings in a couple ways. One, the way the colors blended together and two, the "quick" nature of the artwork. The Impressionists painted their images in a quick manner trying to catch the moment. Sort of moment (or movement) frozen in time. You have to work relatively quickly with the alcohol ink before it all dries. The way some of the colors blended together made me think of Monet's Waterlilies and this image below, "Waterlilies and Japanese Bridge" (1899).

(SOURCE)

I had come across this project for a tape resist of the bridge on The Crafty Classroom blog. Once I had experimented with tape resist on the tiles, I thought it wouldn't be too difficult to recreate a tile version of this painting.

I used Citrus, Sunshine Yellow, and Stream on the "green" portion of the tile. Using the Alcohol Blending Solution and the felt pad applicator.

I let that dry for a couple minutes and then I used a new felt pad to apply a mixture of Stream, Sailboat Blue, and one dot of Citrus. After covering the tile with that, I added one drop of Wild Plum to sort of put purple waterlilies in the water.

Let it dry for a bit, removed the tape, and Voila! Monet's Waterlilies and Japanese Bridge a la Alcohol Ink Tile.

My 8 year old wanted to know how I made the Monet tile, but didn't want to do the bridge. So here is her version. BUT, check out something else NEW we learned! Do you see those swirls in the blue??? Does that make you think of another famous artist and painting???

When she made those swirls, we both breathed in really quickly and looked at each other excitedly. She turned to me and said, "Van Gogh!!!" Yep! This inspired us to try and make a Starry, Starry Night tile.

 We put a drop or two of Sunshine Yellow ink on the tip of a Q-tip and just touched it to the tile to create the stars. She is planning to give this tile to her art teacher as an end-of-the-year gift. :-)

Though this next one she made wasn't intentional, it reminds me so much of Georgia O'Keefe's work!

Isn't it beautiful!

I began to think about what other artists' work would translate well to this process. Mondrian was easy enough. I just taped off some vertical and horizontal lines and used red, blue and yellow to fill them in. This one had a learning curve though. I had to redo the tile three times before i was happy with it. I figured out that by having a Q-tip ready when I filled in the smaller areas, I could soak up excess ink before it spread over the tape into the other shapes. I also did not use Alcohol Blending Solution for this, just straight ink on tile.

I think a Keith Haring tile might be fun. I came across this work by him:

(SOURCE)

I thought this could be translated pretty well. I made the tile with similar colors. Then I used a Q-tip dabbed with the Memento archival ink and drew the dancing people.

 I had to repeat the ink process about 4 times to end up with this:

I might have to try this one again sometime. It was REALLY hard to remove the alcohol ink where it was thicker, where two or more colors had mixed and settled. I think if I did this again, I might apply a lighter layer of ink applied with a Q-tip or something. Then, the stamp resist with the Q-tip would work out better. But it still gives a nice representation of Haring's painting.

I've also become familiar with Romero Britto's work recently. Super fun, bright and blocky! Perfect for this sort of project. I found this image:

(SOURCE)

I taped the bold lines off except for the wings. Applied the ink to the different areas. Then I used a Q-tip with one or two dots of the same ink on the top and created the pattern designs by running the Q-tip over the first layer of ink. No Alcohol Blending Solution was used for this tile. Once the background was done. I let it dry for a few minutes. Then I used a Q-tip dabbed with Memento Archival Ink to draw in the wings.

I rinsed the tile with water and the ink was removed (MUCH easier than the Haring tile).

 I removed the tape. Then I dipped a Q-tip in the StazOn black ink and drew with it on the tile over the tape lines. I tried to do one consistent line as much as I could. If I lifted up at all or went back over something, the ink lifted up a bit or wasn't quite as dark.

 And there you go! A Britto-inspired work on an alcohol ink tile!

What other artists do you think would be fun to try with this process???

Ella's First Art Show!

My 8 year old has her artwork hanging up in an art show this month! They chose just a few students' work from her school to hang in the school district administration building and her sunflowers were chosen. We stopped by this afternoon to see it hanging on the wall. We are so excited for her and proud of her!!

2011: Art Project 2--Sunflowers

For our project today, I wanted to focus on Van Gogh's Sunflowers. But I thought it would be fun to show the girls some sunflowers by other artists as well:

Paul Gauguin (but now I can't find my source for this image.)

Large Sunflowers, Emil Nolde, 1928

Girl with Sunflowers, Deigo Rivera

Sunflowers, Van Gogh, 1888

After showing the girls famous artists' versions of sunflowers, I showed them a link to an art blog where 2nd graders made Van Gogh-inspired sunflowers. They particularly liked this one:
I also had a couple books from the library that they could look at:
Art Profiles for Kids: Vincent Van Gogh by Jim Whiting and DK Eyewitness Books: Van Gogh by Bruce Bernard. Both have plenty of great information on Van Gogh, show all his major works, and give a timeline of this life. Very good for a bit older kids who may be interested in learning more about a particular artist.


I didn't really give the girls much direction today, other than I wanted them to recreate Van Gogh's Sunflowers. We talked again about using different shades of one color. We talked about spatial issues on the page. Where to draw a horizon line and how to make everything "fit" on the page; ie: don't draw it too small or too big. Draw everything so it fits nicely on the page.



Boy, am I glad I purchased those watercolor pencils! They are still a bit hit. Lily especially LOVES them!


I have to say, Lily did a really FANTASTIC job! She listened to what the project was supposed to be and followed that. She used all pencil and watercolor pencil to make her creation. She did a nice job of trying to draw the sunflower petals more pointy as they should be. Ella wanted to go her own way a bit more and wasn't excited about really making her flowers look specifically like sunflowers. But you know, it's her creation, if she wants to do her own thing, I try to let her do that. :-) She used colored pencils, markers, and slick sticks.

2011: Art Project 1: Self-Portraits

The girls were so excited to do their first art journal project today!! They could hardly wait until I got their brother down for his nap. I've decided that our first project each year will be a self-portrait. I did this last year (though I didn't write a blog post about it). Last year, I thought it would be good to just start out instructing them to draw whatever they wanted but they had to draw themselves in the picture. Here are last year's drawings:

Above is Lily's self-portrait last year (when she was 4 years old).
It shows her and her two lovey bears.

This is Ella's (at 6 years old). She told me she was enjoying a beautiful summer day. :-)

This year, I was a tiny bit more structured in that I did show them some self-portraits by famous artists (all images are screen captures I found using Google Images):
This first image is a self-portrait of Vermeer. We talked about how realistic the image looked and how he painted himself with a background. That it showed his whole body. I also told them that they didn't have cameras this long ago and we would never know what these artists looked like if they hadn't painted themselves.
This one is a self-portrait of Frida Kahlo. The girls and I talked about how this image didn't look as realistic as the Vermeer portrait. The girls didn't think she probably really had monkeys on her back. I didn't get into any of the symbolism of Kahlo's work because it would be way too deep for the girls. So we just left it as her picture was more imaginative than Vermeer's.
I asked the girls if they could maybe guess which artist this was. They didn't know. So then I asked them if the swirls told them anything. They still drew a blank, so I showed them their pictures of Starry, Starry Night from last year and they both immediately said, "Van...Van....oh, I can't remember!" Yep, Van Gogh!
The last image I showed them was Allegory as Painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, a female Italian Baroque painter. I told the girls this was one of my all-time favorite artists and that she was special because there were not very many female painters at all during her time.

Finally, we talked about how a self-portrait could be just someone's head and shoulders, part of their body, or their whole body. It could be with a landscape background or just a painted background real or pretend.

Then I told them to go ahead and use any of the art supplies they wanted (and I had them ALL out today) and make their self-portrait for this year. I had some new supplies they hadn't used before. I showed them how to use the watercolor pencils; first by coloring in an area and then by dipping their finger in water and gently "brushing" where they colored. They LOVED this. I think these are going to be a favorite art supply for the summer.

Here are some images of their work in progress:



Trying out the watercolor pencils below:


And their finished self-portraits:

Above: Ella's self-portrait. Again, her on a sunny summer day.
Below: Lily's self-portrait. She told me she's about to walk into the water at the beach.

It's so fun to compare to their drawings last year and to see the progress they've made in their drawing skills.

Because I knew they would be especially excited about art today, I figured they wouldn't be totally satisfied with just doing one picture. So I had them create a "2011" page in their journal to mark where this year's projects start. They could decorate this however they wanted as well.

Above: Lily's 2011, Below; Ella's 2011.