Bas relief with clay and plaster

This project is a great opportunity  to teach kids about bass relief, positive and negative, curving and casting.

First, we rolled out clay to a thickness of about an inch and placed the flatten clay in a plastic frozen food tray.

Then, we used pencils to curve lines. We used various tools, like bottle caps, pods and seeds, shells, card boards and others to stamp impressions.

Now the clay is ready to pour the plaster mixture on it.

The week after, we popped out the plaster and piled the clay away (the clay stays moist because of the plaster so you can reuse it), and...Tadaa!

WE noted that the clay cast is a mirror image of the clay impression we made (make sure to tell the kids that if they want to write their names, they must write them in a mirror way).

And now comes the really fun part - PAINTING!

We used watercolor to paint the plaster. I like the subtle, pastel quality of the results, but acrylic should work too.

A Piece of my Art

Every year I'm looking for creative ways to incorporate hearts into our art for Valentine's Day. 
This year I thought about Jim Dime and his colorful hearts. 





I offered the kids to deep yarn into glue and water mixture and to place the sticky yarn inside a heart shape cookie cutter that was placed over wooden boards which were painted with acrylic.
Then we stuck paintbrush into the heart, to serve as a Cupid arrow.

Chinese New Year and Ink Paniting

In honor of the Chinese new year, the 6, 7 and 8 years old used a Chinese calligraphic brushes and ink to depict the blooming of a cherry (Or other kinds of trees). We paid especially attention to the unique compositions in the traditional  Chinese brush paintings.

 This is the tray each kid used, it contains dark black ink, diluted black and red ink. 

 First we practiced brush strokes with the calligraphic brush

After finishing our painting we pasted some Chinese papers on mat boards

 and we even added our own signature, made with handmade stamp