Art Group Day 2- Yellow Umbrella Paintings

Art Group was a total success today.  I can't remember where I saw this project idea originally because I have since seen it several places but I believe it originated with Julie Liddle, art therapist and art teacher, who runs Art in Hand in Washington, DC.  We looked at the beautiful Yellow Umbrella book by Dong Il Sheen & Jae-Soo Liu.  It has a CD of music that goes along with the pictures instead of words.  We discussed the mood of each picture and what the kids could hear happening in the music.  

Then we talked a little about painting.  My sister in law L gave me the idea to talk about the paint brush as a little friend we needed to take care of.  We called him Peter paintbrush and talked about how Peter likes to take care of his hair.  He doesn't like it pulled or to have his head pushed into the ground hard.  Peter likes to wear different outfits.  I had mixed pastel colored tempera paints up in bowls for the kids ahead of time.  So first Peter tried out a pink outfit from one of the bowls.  Then Peter could play on the paper and paint.  Peter needs a bath between outfits so the kids had a cup of water and a towell to dry him and then he could try on a different color outfit.  It worked really well.  They did a great job sharing all of the paint and not contaminating the colors.  After they had finished painting we added the "umbrellas" on the kids rain paintings by sticking brightly colored tissue paper circles onto the paint.  The results were great and it was a perfect project for this age group.  I was especially pleased with Red Fish's results.  She is going through this new phase of painting where she covers the entire page in different colors of paint.  She has done dozens of paintings over the last couple weeks and there hasn't been a hint of the paper showing through.  It's interesting to watch the different phases the kids go through.

The only part of art group that didn't go so smoothly was me.  I dropped the blue bowl of paint while telling the Peter paintbrush story and New Fish dove right into it and looked like a little smurf.  She made quite a mess.  I guess I should have expected nothing less!