Art Project #8; Oil Pastel Flowers

I love that our 100 Days of Art challenge is keeping me motivated to try to put some art back into our days of schooling but we're still struggling with finding activities that all three boys are willing to work on.

Friday I asked them all to pick a medium they'd like to work with and suggested markers, paints, watercolors, chalk pastels, oil pastels.... and after a bit of debating they all decided on oil pastels. 

I was kind of glad because that is a whole new medium for the boys that we've never really used before.  

We finally settled on making some large flowers and I sat with the boys to go through the process with them step by step.


They all told me they LOVE it when I do the project with them and model what they need to do each step of the way.  

Of course, since this is art, there is no wrong way to do it either and I love that even when we work together all of our work turns out so unique and different.

We started by drawing a half or part of a circle either on the sides or corner of our paper and I encouraged the boys to use at least three different colors going from light to dark.  This was going to be the center of our flowers.  They could pick any colors they wanted; even if they had never noticed a flower that color before.





Once we had our centers done I showed them how to draw petals going around and told them they could draw as many or as few as they'd like. 

Then we each chose two or three colors to shade our leaves.


The boys were working hard to cover up all the white and since we used textured paper it was a bit difficult.  I offered to give them each a small brush and some baby oil; I explained that if they lightly ran the brush of baby oil over their picture the baby oil would spread the oil pastels around and blend them together more like watercolors. 

Ian and Evan were game to try it but Alec liked his picture just the way it was and didn't want to use any baby oil.


They were all quite happy with their flowers when we were done and I was surprised that it really didn't take us very long to squeeze in a bit of art at all. 


Linking Up With:



artsy-fartsy mama

Comments

  1. Emily CopelandMay 17, 2016 at 9:08 PM

    Can't wait to try this in the next few days! :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnnetteMay 18, 2017 at 7:29 AM

    I am not much of an 'arty' person myself, so I wouldn't know where to start with oil pastels. My daughter would love this project though...
    #FamilyFun

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Mother of 3May 18, 2017 at 11:00 AM

      It was a lot of fun and surprisingly easy. I wasn't sure they were all going to be able to draw it or not. The coloring was the easy part.

      Delete
  3. Tammymum BlogMay 21, 2017 at 2:03 PM

    Look at the concentration on their face. It looks like a great activity to do together although I must confess I wouldn't know much about pastels, we just about manage your basic painting in our house lol Thanks for joining us at #familyfun xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Mother of 3May 22, 2017 at 7:22 AM

      Pastels are rather fun to use; kind of like a messier version of crayons.

      Delete

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