Peacock Art Project

I found this cute art project on one of my favorite blogs; Whatever: http://www.megduerksen.typepad.com/
It is making peacocks!! First I painted the kids' hands to make the head, beak, and top feathers.

After they put their hand print on the paper, they painted the neck & body of the peacock:

While the bodies dried, we painted papers for the feathers. We used blue, purple, and green for the big part of the feathers, and orange, red, and yellow for the circles on the feathers. We swirled the paint together to make designs & then used popsicle sticks to make swirls in the paint before it dried.

After they were dry, we cut out feather shapes & circles.

Then we glued the feathers on to the paper & added the circles:

We added eyes to the heads, cut them out, and glued them to the feathers.

Here are our peacocks!!

Since we had extra paper left over, I saved some back so Emma could make a peacock too! Here is her tiny little hand print:

And here is her cute baby peacock!

These were a lot of fun to make & the kids were excited about how they turned out! =)

Letter Art Project

Last week, we made these cool letter canvas paintings. I saw a version of it on my friend Nikki's blog. They used painter's tape to tape designs on their canvases, but I decided to just do the first letter of their first name.
This is what I needed:

Canvases (I used 81/2 x 11), painter's tape, acrylic paint, and brushes.

First, I taped their letter onto their canvas:

I bought 2 shades of each of their favorite colors, and then they used those two shades to make a third shade that they liked:

Then they each painted lines across their canvas and over the tape, alternating colors.

Riley & Lily went straight across, but Zach chose to do it diagonally.

When they were done, we let them sit and dry.

After they were dry, I pulled off the tape. 

Their letters really stand out against the paint! They all got to choose where they got to hang them in their rooms. Good job kids!

Window Art

The other day we painted sun catchers:

It's a fun way to brighten up our windows.

Only, don't put them on the side of your sliding glass door that doesn't open, and then open that sliding glass door. Because if you do, the door might knock some of the sun catchers down, and some might fall into the track for the door and get stuck and then you might have to take off the door and get them out because you might not be able to close the door otherwise.

Not that, that happened to me, I'm just saying it might happen.....

While I was at Walmart getting the sun catchers, I saw these:

I thought these would be fun for the kids to do also.

They had fun drawing all over the windows!!

Lily made fish and flowers:

(Sorry these are kind of hard to see.)

Zach made a maze, then erased it all and made a person and an airplane that he labeled:

Riley drew his name and then made "Riley Flowers":

These were actually pretty cheap, about $4.00 for the box of markers.

They were really easy to wipe off the glass (even after they had been there for awhile).

The only draw back, is that they stained the kids' hands and I think that had they gotten on their clothes, they probably would have stained those too, even though the box said washable.

I am sure we will be using these a lot this summer!