Whether you are heading an art class for youngsters or just want to expose your own child's creative spirit, kid-friendly art projects are fun for everyone. There are endless possibilities when it comes to kid's art, but sometimes nothing comes to mind. It will help to learn two easy projects to entertain children of elementary school age and provide them with a creative outlet for their inner artists.
Lines and Leaves
This project begins with tracing specific shapes and ends with unbridled creative options for the child.
You will need a large piece of blank paper, along with pencils, various colored markers and cardboard stencils in the shape of leaves. Try oak, maple and beech, for example. You may want to make your own stencil cutouts using real leaves.
Ask the children to trace a couple of the leaf shapes onto their paper with a pencil. The leaves may overlap or be side-by-side. Once the shapes are traced, ask them to draw in the veins of the leaves with the pencil, then trace over everything they've done with a black marker.
Now they are ready to get creative. Tell the child to imagine any shape they want to draw. It can be little stars, wavy lines, zigzags or whatever they like. Tell them to fill each section of the leaf with one of those shapes. That section may be a sea of wavy lines or filled with tiny stars. And ask them to do all the shapes in the same color. Then they should move to another section, choose a new shape and color and fill it in until all the sections are done.
In a final step to their colorful pieces, ask them to draw colored "energy lines" to fill in the rest of the page. These will consist of lines that mimic the outer shape of each leaf and radiate out toward the edge of the paper. The result will be a very interesting and visually pleasing piece of art that the kids will expect to see hanging on the fridge at home.
Cooperative Art
If you want to see an art class full of enthusiastic children, design a project that they all work on together. The project can be huge and colorful, which will make them all like it more. In addition, the cooperative art project is perfect for intermingling new kids, so that they get to know one another and get along better.
A simple project is the hand-print rainbow. It requires a very large piece of paper or cardboard cut into an arch, a variety of finger paints (the colors of the rainbow work best) and paint trays.
Ask the children to hold their hands out with fingers spread apart. Let them dip into the colors of their choice and proceed one at a time to the paper on the table, floor or wall. Show them where to make their hand prints. Decide which colors will be on which row, and have each color hand prints line up in a rainbow shape on the paper. In other words, the result could be a red row on top, followed by an orange row, yellow row, green row and blue row all making the hand-print rainbow.
