Kids Art Night

I had originally wanted to do a Pop Art for Kids night, but I had trouble coming up with enough appropriate activities. Plus, once I started looking at stuff on Pinterest, there were so many other famous artwork-inspired crafts for kids that I wanted to do, that it turned into a more general Kids Art Night.

I ended up having activities for Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Henri Matisse, Andy Warhol, and Alexander Calder. I kind of wished I had stuck with a theme or movement, just for the sake of cohesiveness, but whatever. I picked those because I felt the activities were doable for my space, my means, and my patrons.

For the Jackson Pollock table, I made up a few dozen rectangle sugar cookies (I used this cookie cutter), iced in white. I had different colored icing in squeeze bottles for them to sling on the cookies, as well as some leftover gel icing tubes from our last cookie decorating activity. I wouldn't recommend the gel icing in tubes because it won't dry and it doesn't taste very good. For the squirt bottles, I just mixed powdered sugar with water and food coloring until I got the consistency I wanted. The icing would have taken forever to dry, but it didn't matter because they were immediately eaten anyway.

I was inspired by Hostess with the Mostess and Catch My Party.

We made mobiles for Alexander Calder, from floral wire and foam shapes. I found a template for Calder shapes at ARTiculation360, which I used the library's Cricut to cut out of primary-colored + black foam.

I was inspired by this We Are Teachers blog post and Create Art With Mrs. P.

I combined Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein for the Pop Art table, which had coloring pages of a Lichtenstein girl and a soup can. I also made two games for this corner:

an Andy Warhol Soup Can Toss, which was our Halloween carnival can toss game (similar to this one) covered in Warhol soup can labels, available as a free printable from Katie Day Photo.

I also had The Lichtenstein Whaam! which was another knock-down bean bag toss game (where you POP! the art down, so to speak). This was also a Halloween carnival game that I covered in pictures of Lichtenstein girls.

For Matisse, we did cut outs. I had lots of Matisse-inspired shapes already cut that could be arranged and glued onto construction paper, or they could cut their own with the scissors I had out.

I was inspired by The Crafty Classroom (where I found the Matisse shape templates) and Playground Parkbench.

For Picasso, I purchased this Roll a Picasso game from Expressive Monkey. I set out colored pencils and enlarged and printed several different Picasso face shapes, then let the kids roll the dice to see what kind of Picasso-esque ears, nose, mouth, and eyes to draw. Then they could roll again to see what type of patterns and texture to implement onto their drawings. I was the most concerned about this one, because I thought they might get overwhelmed or think it was too hard, but there were no problems. And they all turned out really cute!

I had information about each featured artist printed out, but there wasn't really room on the tables for them like I had originally planned. So I stuck them on my table full of kids art books that were available to be checked out.

I used our poster printer to put examples of each artist's work on the walls, and typed up a little museum object label for each one. I also had a slide show going with more information and art examples.