Pointing Your child to God | Kathy, The Picture Lady

This week we’ll take making tints of the same color one step further to make warm and cool color blends. It’s lots of fun to mix a couple colors and see how many different blends you can get.

I’ve added 2 new sections at the end of this lesson to help you extend art learning into other areas. Be sure to look at:

How this art lesson can help your children in other areas of learning:
How this art lesson can help point your children to God:

I’ll also show you how you can adapt this project for older and younger children. So let’s have some fun making art!

Supplies:

White construction paper, larger sheets for backgrounds as well as scraps
Pencils, scissors, crayons
Tempera paints
Various sizes of brushes, Q tips
glue or tape

Directions for the Warm Fish:

Older children

Draw a fish or 2 on paper scraps
Draw interior designs on the fish. If you wish, outline lines in crayon to help paint stay in spaces.
Gradually mix yellow and red, paint the fish with these blends. I painted one fish in blends from yellow at its nose through oranges to red at its tail. On the other fish I just spaced the different blends around the fish.
Let dry and flatten, then cut out your fish

Younger children

Allow them to enjoy mixing warm blends and painting these on a paper
Let dry and draw a fish on these later to cut out

Directions for Cool Water:

Older children

Draw wavy lines to make spaces on your larger background paper
Mix blues and greens and purples to paint inside these spaces. Space your blends around the paper to create a pleasing pattern of lights and darks. (If you paint around the edges of a space first, you can fill it in quickly and more smoothly)
Let dry and flatten

Younger children

Allow children to enjoy mixing blends of cool colors and painting these all over the background paper

Assembling:

Glue or tape your warm fish to the cool background and enjoy the resulting contrast!!
Add some bubbles with white paint and Q tips if you wish

How this art lesson can help your children in other areas of learning:

For many children mixing the paints to see how many different blends they can get is as much fun as the actual painting!! Mixing paint and discovering these fosters better observation skills! Have lots of scrap paper and paper towels, and enjoy the process!!
Using the tools of art such as paint brushes and pencils and scissors helps develop fine motor skills.
Cutting with scissors is often an especially hard skill for children to master, but so helpful for when they go to school. If your child is really struggling with this skill, try the loop scissors pictured here. One pair works for either right-handed or left-handed children and they are available in blunt or sharp points. In my art room, they’re a favorite with all my students, younger and older!!

How this art lesson can help point your children to God:

On walks or in your yard, have children find all the different greens, from light yellow greens of new leaves and grass to darker bluish greens of pines and older leaves!
Get up close with flowers and see how God often blends darker colors and lighter colors on the flower.
Look at how colors change from sunlight to shade.
Look up at the sky and see how the blues change from day to day, depending on clouds and time of day.
Look closely at a pond or lake or the ocean and name all the colors you see.
Pause and thank God for providing such a colorful world for us to enjoy!