Cool Summer Art Project Ideas

      Most children love arts and crafts and over the summer months they are a great way to keep kids busy while letting them be constructive and come out with a piece of art they can be proud of.  Oil pastels are a great medium for children that offer a lot of flexibility while being somewhat easy to work with.  Oil pastels can usually be purchased at an art store or even a dollar store in most cases.  Here are two great projects your children can complete with a little bit of elbow grease and some creativity. 

Scratch Art Project: All you need is some paper and some good oil pastels to make a stunning piece of art.

1. Give the children a heavy card stock sheet of paper, 8.5″ x 11″ is good. With a pencil, ask them to draw at least 3 simple upside-down curves to represent hills. Next they are to draw a circle sun somewhere in the sky, and then add concentric circles around it until the sky is filled. No houses or trees are needed.
2.  Next the pencil lines are to be traced with a fat, black sharpie.
3.  Ask the students to color in all the shapes with oil pastels, coloring slowly so that no paper shows when complete. Bright colors are best (yellow, red, orange, green and blue). No blacks, browns or navy as they won’t contrast enough from the upcoming black.
4. Each student is to color over their entire picture with black pastel, the darker the better.
5. With a wooden stick, the black can be scratched away to reveal the bottom colors. Encourage the students to make their lines go in different directions to create the maximum amount of “energy” in their drawing.

Courtesy of: Art Projects for Kids

Layered Leaves: You can show students how to overlap leaves and blend colors with oil pastels, and have very lovely picture as the result.

1. You can think of the maple leaf as the classic fall shape, and made templates out of chip board (or collect real leaves to trace) with the stem left off. Give each student one leaf and ask them to trace at least two leaves that overlap. Ask the students to choose which leaf is on top, and explain that all the lines inside that leaf must be erased. They can then add some leaves going off the page, and some veins as well.
2.  All of the pencil lines are to be traced with a thin black marker.
3. Ask the students to use at least two oil pastel colors in each leaf, overlapping as they go along. Oil pastels are the best for blending colors together, so the goal is to not have any “hard” edges between the colors.
4. Lastly, the background needs to be colored in with a contrasting color.
5. Courtesy of: Art Projects for Kids

      My children and I completed these two projects and had amazing results.   The Art Projects for Kids website has hundreds of craft ideas and also sells murals for coloring by students.  All of the projects listed on Art Projects for Kids have detailed instructions and photos of what the finished projects should look like. 

       Here is a photo of our leaf projects completed by mom, Jesslynn aged 10 and Colton aged 12.  In the photo you can see how each of us had a different vision and style that was quite apparent.  It is a fun experiment to see how each family members art will turn out!

Have fun creating!

Blessings,
Karrie