Free-Form Fall Painting Party: Unstructured Art Time Is Important
Put on a Free-Form Fall Painting Party and let your littles (g’littles) have some unstructured art time. Just cover all surfaces, give them brushes and admire the amazing results.
“Grandma, let’s do a craft. Please! It’s boring!”
We’re watching the g’littles for the afternoon and evening, and after dinner is packed away they want action.
But my imagination hadn’t left the station… I couldn’t think of a single thing I wanted to let them do (mess, you know) that they wanted to do.
I aimlessly perused my stash cabinets…
Then, bingo! I found something they jumped on. Painting!
There was a bag full of fall colored paints and some simple fall themed outlines for this project.
I grabbed some brushes, jars of water to rinse brushes and lots of paper towel.
They had an hour of pure bliss with no guidance or suggestions from me. They just grabbed the printed papers and painted however they wanted.
This was not an art lesson. No expected outcome.
And I loved seeing the individual results. Three girls, each painting in their own style.
Unfortunately, I didn’t take any shots of the amazing pictures they proudly packed home to show mom and dad. All three starting out with the same outlines didn’t keep them from producing very different results.
All that was required of grandma was admiring the pumpkins and butterflies, and cleaning up after them. Paint is really easy to wipe up if you do it soon enough. It’s a lot harder to keep it contained when littles go at it. It just makes all of you frustrated if you ask them to be careful.
Free-Form Fall Painting Party
Supplies:
- Protected surface and paint clothes
- Fall colored paints, craft acrylics or tempura paint. They liked both. Oh, and add pink, because girls always have to have pink.
- Brushes, water jars, paper towel
- Printed Fall themed outlines, like these in this post.
- An hour or more of free time, as unsupervised as possible.
Notes:
- The beauty of free-form art: no directions required.
- Have you noticed how children love to express themselves without parameters? They did not want to be told what to do. They saw the pictures, and they knew what they wanted to do. After a day in school, they needed the time to be free and unorganized.
- In the supply list, I linked to the brush set I would get if I didn’t already have a lot of oldish artist’s brushes in my stash. They need something more than the cheapest brushes often provided for kid’s crafts. The brush needs to do some of the work. They’ll get frustrated if they can’t get the results they want, and you need reasonably good brushes for that. When they say, “Grandma, can I use your good brush?” you hesitate a little. They need to learn to respect good quality brushes, but free-form art isn’t the proper time to teach that respect. I did tell her how I would do it, as I don’t always use top quality brushes to paint. If you know how, you can manipulate most any brush to get the result you want (except those in kid’s crafts for some unfathomable reason). She wanted to paint small areas without smearing, so I suggested she moisten the tip of her brush and pick up less paint. She caught on fast.
Importance of Free-Form Art Versus Structured Lessons
We vaguely realize art is important for our children. Here’s what backlight.mu says:
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Most of us instinctually know that art is important for our children; we simply believe it’s important because we’ve seen our children deeply involved in art. But beyond what we feel and believe, there is much factual information about why art is important in our children’s development that is both interesting and helpful to know. Creating art expands a child’s ability to interact with the world around them, and provides a new set of skills for self-expression and communication. Not only does art help to develop the right side of the brain, it also cultivates important skills that benefit a child’s development. But art goes far beyond the tangible statistics measured by studies — it can become a pivotal mode of uninhibited self-expression and amazement for a child. Art matters the same way language matters — or the way breathing matters! It is a fundamental component of what makes us uniquely human.
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Free form versus structured consensus:
Kids need time and freedom to do what they wish, but they also need to learn basic art techniques. Little tips like how to load the brush with paint help them get their desired result.
Once they have some structured lessons under their belt, let them have free form art time. Get out a table full of supplies and let them have at it. The g’littles love an afternoon of creating when our ping-pong table is loaded with all our baskets of supplies and paper. They enjoy doing the project Kim or I prepped for them, but then they’re off doing their own thing. They spend lots more time and effort on their own creations than on the ideas we prepped.
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Angela Poll, a teacher at the Peel District School Board in Ontario, prefers to follow the child’s lead when it comes to art. “Some students respond to following steps because drawing or painting, etc. might not be their favorite thing to do, or they haven’t tried it before,” says Angela. Angela also emphasizes the importance of not interpreting children’s art or insisting their art represent the real world, such as suggesting skies be blue. “Imagine if Dali’s art teacher corrected his genius!” weareteachers.com
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Let them paint…
Post this to your kid’s art idea Pinterest board for later:
