Easy Tree Painting - Kids Art Project

This was a really great painting project I did with my art class. I let them choose a neutral background color and then we painted in the details of the trees with credit cards and sea sponges.  It was a very easy project and the kids did a great job.  We focused on the shadows and highlights on the trees to make them a little dimensional. They also used their fingers to smear paint underneath the trees and sometimes even in the trees.

Here is my YouTube instructional video for this project.

Profile Silhouette Collage - Kids Art Project

This is a project I did with my art class back in the fall 2014. I am just now getting around to posting it! This was really fun for the kids.  I think they enjoyed finding images in the magazines as much as anything.  We used canvas panels and mod podge to adhere the pictures, but we could have easily done the whole thing on paper with glue (and I kinda wish we had because the mod podge was pretty messy).

To start with, I took profile photos of the kids the week before and printed them out on a full page sheet.  In class we cut out around the photos leaving a silhouette to use as a template.  I did it this way because we did not have time to try to trace our shadows (and I had a hard time in testing it at home trying to get a good outline that way).  We traced our templates onto a large 12" x 12" scrapbook paper and then onto our 9"x12" canvas panels (making sure to line up the templates in the same place.  Using the outline as a rough guide I had the kids fill in their faces with magazine images and words. They used mod podge to glue the pieces onto the canvas panels (going over the outline so that the edges would be covered). While they worked, I cut out all the silhouettes and trimmed down the scrapbook paper to 9"x12".  To finish they again used mod podge to glue down the scrapbook paper outline of their face which covered up all the rough edges and made a clean silhouette.  We used up all of our 1.5 hour time slot.  The kids were very creative with their image choices.  Some were pretty funny (see BACON).  The photos are a little cloudy because the mod podge was still drying.