Sunshine Still Life

Still life drawing is a wonderful way for children to practice their observational drawing skills, but sometimes can feel a little overwhelming! Here are some tips that might be helpful…

Set up a small vase with only a few daffodils in it – glass vases will be harder as they reflect light.

Before you start drawing, have a look at a daffodil and see how you can simplify it into easy shapes so it does not seem so tricky (see examples here).

Encourage your child to draw exactly what they see rather than try to create their idea of what a “perfect” daffodil looks like – encourage them to look often at the vase in front of them!

Drawing BIG will make it simpler for your child – suggest they try to fill the page!

We recommend no rubbers as this encourages children to think out of the box and not obsess on perfection!

Why not experiment with using charcoal instead of pencil?

Once they are happy with their finished drawing, you can paint with water-colours, acrylics or even use colourful pencils and oil pastels.

Think about all the different tones of yellow, orange and green that you use to colour your flowers!

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What art materials should kids have at home?

What art materials should kids have at home?

Being able to choose their own paints, glues and scissors gives children the freedom to be creative at any time. LoLA has produced three beautiful wicker baskets (in collaboration with @edit58) to store a wide range of art materials, even in the smallest of spaces! There are two smaller baskets (with the word ‘ART’ woven on the outside in different colours: teal and pink), and one bigger one (our favourite) with a Pompom palette on the side – perfect for all those paints, pencils, brushes and inks that tend to be left strewn around the house.

Here is a list of the art materials that we like to keep at home for our own children: 

In a smaller ART basket (teal is our favourite!)

• A set of markers (we love Giotto or Djeco, but there are lots of brands out there)
• A set of colouring pencils, the more colours the merrier (Winsor & Newton is what we are using at the moment)
• Chalk pastels 
• Oil pastels 
• Charcoal
• A black marker (like a Sharpie)
• A pencil, a rubber and a sharpener

In a second small ART basket (pink!)

• PVA glue
• Glue sticks
• Scissors
• A ruler
• And a bag full of shiny extra materials – such as glitter, beads, confetti, feathers, etc
(We use Ikea bags for space-saving simplicity – they keep materials separate, visible and clean. But if you’d prefer a greener option, reusing old tins or pots from the recycling bin can also work well!)

In the large POMPOM PALETTE basket
• Big tubes of acrylic paint – including some fun colours like gold, silver, neon etc!
• Paintbrushes of different sizes and thicknesses, a pipette and some sponges
• Watercolour tubes (Seawhite’s range is our favourite, and we have included some in past LoLA boxes)
• An acrylic paint set
• Watercolour palette sets (Artist’s Loft has some fantastic choices)
• Paint sticks (Little Brian is a firm favourite with us)
• Pots of colourful inks (or liquid watercolours)

LoLA’s subscription boxes focus on a different art material each month, and the paints, pastels or watercolours included in each box can be used again and again. By the end of a year’s subscription, your child will have tried lots of different materials and their art baskets (or cupboards) will be filled with art supplies! 

Have a look at the three-month, 12-month and every-other-month subscriptions here – at the moment, the summer offer gives 20% off for the full duration of a subscription. Simply enter the coupon code, SUMMER, at the checkout.

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10 Outdoor Nature art ideas for the Summer

10 Outdoor Nature art ideas for the Summer

For some fun outside this summer, here are a few creative ideas to try with your Little Ones.

Nature has been an inspiration for some of the greatest artists of all time, from Andy Goldsworthy to Barbara Hepworth!

Natural Mandalas

Inspired by the land art of Andy Goldsworthy, collect leaves, flowers and natural objects. Create mandalas by arranging repeating shapes in circles. You can either do this free style on a flat surface, or why not make it permanent by gluing your natural objects onto a thick piece of paper or cardboard?

Rubbings

Use a crayon or oil pastel and some paper to do a tree bark rubbing. Tape your paper to the tree and see what comes out! You can create a rubbing of almost any natural object! As well as tree trunks, why not also try leaf rubbings? Don’t forget to place your leaf vein side up, and to use oil pastels, crayons or pencils for the best results!

Make a fairy door

Paint and decorate a small door out of recycled materials. You could use cardboard, but if you can find some plastic, maybe from a styrofoam tray or plastic fruit plate, then it would also be water resistant! If you find any small pieces of wood or bark that you can forage from outside that could work too! You can use paints, or markers or even oil pastels! When finished, place at the bottom of a tree and keep an eye out for fairies!.. 

Nature paint brushes

This is super easy and a fun way to try painting with new materials! Find some twigs outside of different lengths, and also natural materials you may like to paint with – grasses, leaves, bits of bushes..? Then attach these to the end of your twigs with elastic bands, and ta da! Dip into paint and see what kind of different brushstrokes you can create!

Colourful Branches

We love to paint branches and use them to create beautiful colourful mobiles! Pick the most interesting branches you can find outside and start to paint them with acrylic paints. You could paint each section in one colour, or create rainbow stripes; you could add on sections wrapped in wools and yarns or ribbons; you could glue on gems or shake on glitter! When finished and dry, hang in a window, or use it to create a fun mobile.

Nature Faces

Why not gather lots of interesting natural elements from outside – flowers, petals, leaves, twigs, grasses, shells, sand, mud..! On a big thick piece of white paper, puzzle your elements together to create a face! Maybe rock eyes, grass eyelashes, leaf lips, flower hair..?! When you are happy with your creation you can also stick it down to make it more permanent, or why not take a photo and send it to friends and family!

Sun Prints

Here is a simple way of creating easy prints on a sunny day! You can use sun print paper if you have it, but if not blue paper/card works well too! Go out and forage for interesting leaves, flowers and grasses. Place these in a pleasing manner onto your paper. Carefully carry outside into full late morning/lunchtime sun. For sun print paper this should not take very long at all (about 5 minutes), but for normal blue paper you may need to leave it out for much longer! We recommend you do this on a really sunny day, with no wind… And do check out artbarblog’s fantastic blog post on this project!

Flower and Leaf Crowns

These can change according to the season, but we love a good crown! Make a simple crown or band shaped headband from either thick cardboard or brown paper. Go out and choose some of your favourite natural elements – in summer this might be flowers and petals, or even shells and sand; in Autumn this might be colourful leaves! Cover your long strip of crown paper in glue and start sticking on your natural elements! Leave to dry and then staple or stick together – make sure it can fit snugly on your head! 

Sidewalk (or Trampoline!) Chalk

Chalk is such a fun artistic medium and always a good one to get out in warmer months! If you live in a city, in the countryside or even by the sea, there will always be somewhere to experiment with chalk – be it a pavement, big rocks, or even your trampoline!!!

Leaf Animals

Leaves come in so many different shapes, sizes and colours! Why not pick a really varied collection and then see if you can puzzle them together to create some fun leaf animals – a giraffe, a fish or even a dinosaur..?!

Nature book recommendations

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The Little Grand Tour’s insight

Each month, Isabel from The Little Grand Tour lends her insight to our art themes with a page in our instruction booklets. She adds wonderful context and suggests further art pieces to look at, or indeed, places, to go out and see.

To add depth and dimension to your child’s creative education, we highly recommend The Little Grand Tours – art teachers take children in small groups around art, either in museums or galleries or even in parks or on the streets of London! 

To extend the theme this month for our Captivating Circus box, Isabel suggests seeing a piece from the National Gallery:

“My most favourite circus painting is Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando by Degas which is in Gallery C at the National Gallery in London. The viewpoint from underneath, the ¾ pose and twist of the body of Miss Lala is really cutting edge for the time. The colours are warm and atmospheric. Miss Lala was a performer with the Cirque Fernando which was built in 1875 near the Place Pigalle in Paris, close to where Degas lived. He saw Miss Lala perform there several times. Her real name was Olga and she was a mixed-race circus performer famous for her strength! I wish we could see her face too – in this painting she is suspended in the air by her teeth – can you imagine! The painting was shown at the Fourth Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1879.”

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The Magic of Cirque Calder

Alexander Calder surprisingly studied engineering at university, which provided a foundation to creating his kinetic sculptures which he is famous for. 
However, the visual spectacle of a circus was something that captured him from a young age. Calder had loved acrobats, and how they balanced on thin wires high up in the air. In 1926 he made a miniature circus out of wire and bits of cork and fabric. He called it the Cirque Calder and artists like Pablo Picasso were invited to come and watch performances! This video shows the wonderful characters in Cirque Calder:

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Collage Project: Cultural Compositions

Romare Bearden was one of the most accomplished African-American painters of the 20th century, and he was also a brilliant musician. As an artist, he became best known for his collages, which he created largely from painted paper, magazine clippings and bits of fabric. 

Bearden’s art is jam-packed with references to history, contemporary social issues, music, people and places.

Take a look at some of his work, especially “The Block” and “Three Folk Musicians”. Then make your own Bearden-style collage:

Print out some black-and-white photos of yourself;

Think about composition and colour. What message are you trying to convey? Are you going to show things that you like, interests that you have, things that you dream about, how you like playing?

Rip some interesting pages out of magazines, newspapers and old books;

Search your craft boxes for old pieces of wallpaper and colourful paper cuttings; 

Then start ripping, cutting and sticking to your heart’s content!

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Q&A Christina Christoforou Illustrator of ‘This is Gaudi’

What artists/people/cultures have influenced you most?

I think I have been deeply affected by various female artists with a ‘theatrical’ quality to them; Louise Bourgeois, Annette Messager and Frida Kahlo to name a few. I have always enjoyed the boldness of their artwork and how it makes you think of stories. That last part is what I always aspired to in my own work.  The biggest inspiration fοr me though has been music and album covers. That is what made me decide that I wanted to create artwork of some kind when I was a teenager.

What does creativity mean to you?

I think that creativity is allowing yourself the freedom to transform your experience of the world into something else, of any kind. Judging from my own experience, I would say by allowing children to be bored and left on their own devices, you give them freedom and independence to make decisions and not labelling them as this or that.

What has fueled your creativity over your lifetime?

Observing human behaviour and also looking at animals.

What has been the biggest change in your field since you first entered it?

It’s a lot easier to create artwork now because of all the tools in our hands, so there is a lot more illustration being produced. Also, everyone is looking at everyone else’s work all the time because of social media, over-influencing one another.

Did you have an exceptional teacher?

In art, I certainly did not. In fact, at school, my teacher was a bitter old man who for some reason that I still escapes me gave me the worst grades I ever had, despite the fact that I was otherwise a good student

How do you think we can better encourage artistic creativity in children who don’t have exceptional teachers?

A teacher certainly helps but I don’t think it’s all about the teacher either. As i mentioned earlier, i think what helps is freedom and some level of independence, some tools but not too many and showing interest in children’s thoughts and ideas without rewarding them all the time.

What do you think is important for children to practise in the world today?

Collaboration

If you have children, do you practise art with your own children? What do you tell them to do in order to improve their artistic skills?

I don’t have children, but I did a couple of workshops with some 8-year-olds a while back, and I remember it was more the other way around.

We were making an imaginary city out of scrap material, and I asked this girl “where are the windows?”, just to start a conversation. She replies “they will be made out of lemonade”. “And how will they open and close,” I ask. “With a straw,” she said, “you suck the lemonade to open them and spit it back out with the straw to close”. So gross and so brilliant. What do you add to that? Only an 8-year-old could come up with it I think.

What inspired ‘This is Gaudi‘?

Gaudi was fascinated with nature and organic forms,  so on one hand this was intentionally very present in the book, natural elements. The other thing that was inspiring was Gaudi’s self-torturing nature and his deeply religious life.

What do you do to reignite inspiration when it seems to have dried up?

I often get fearful of the blank paper and that can be very tough. I find that it helps to draw about the very thing that stops me, about not having any ideas. I have a collection of ‘i have not ideas’ themed artwork, mostly terrible, but it helped.

What are your main unfulfilled ambitions?

To reach a point where I never have fear of the blank paper

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Art Project: Love Notes

Art Project: Love Notes

One of the artists featured in LoLA’s Let There Be Love box is Robert Indiana. He is most famous for his “LOVE” print, first created for the Museum of Modern Art’s Christmas card in 1965. This print was also the basis for his 1970 Love sculpture and the widely distributed 1973 United States Postal Service “LOVE” stamp. His L-O-V-E letters inspire an art piece in the LoLA box where children are encouraged to decorate their homes with LOVE banners and posters!

Could Robert Indiana also inspire us to write some L-O-V-E notes of our own…? To celebrate positive feelings throughout the whole family and encourage children to express their emotions openly, why not write all the things you love about your children and each other on heart-shaped notes..? ‘Post’ these on the door to their room, or create a trail around the house to encourage them too to share positive love notes!

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A LoLA guest artist – Andrea Myers

A LoLA guest artist – Andrea Myers

In LoLA’s Textured Textiles box we are delighted to include a modern textile artist alongside William Morris and Henri Matisse. We have admired Andrea Myers’s work for some time and were overjoyed when she agreed to collaborate with us on a project. 

Myers’s work exists somewhere between two and three dimensions, mixing painting, print-making, sculpture and textiles. She is currently involved in experimenting with collages and the accumulation of layers, using easily accessible materials such as paper, fabric and wood.  

Andrea Myers Collaboration with LoLA

With these simple materials, she builds pieces that take over spaces, walls and (even) corners.  In her textiles, she creates machine-sewn collages from a wide range of fabrics, exploring and manipulating ideas of quilting, applique and patchwork. Textured colour is also a crucial component of her work. She looks at fabric as one might look at tubes of paint, layering harshly coloured materials in close proximity and thus drawing the eye into a sense of concentrated, intensified colour.
Andrea has an upcoming solo exhibition at the Textil und Rennsportmuseum in Hohenstein Ernstthal, Germany in February 2020

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Music & art as therapy

Music & art as therapy

One of our activities this month is inspired by Kandinsky, and it uses music to create an abstract piece of art in response to what we hear. 

Music and art are known to have a beneficial effect in therapies; the concentration in listening or the focus on drawing helps keep the mind still.

“It helps quiet my mind. Concentrating on the colours, lines and shapes takes me away from the noise in my head.” Stuart, Mind (Charity) – For better mental health

Creating abstract art is also a freeing exercise for children as it gives them a safe space to do anything they like, with no judgement on their skill. It can help them to make sense of things and even to understand themselves better, as both music and art touch feelings and emotions. 
Talking about the artwork and asking questions, like, How does it make you feel? What did you think about while you were painting? can help children to communicate and express themselves as part of the art process.

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